Through Time and Space
by PI-Valkyrie-exLorien
Summary: Irina Spalko is captain of an infiltration unit in the Russian Army, in the final years of WWII. This is the tale of her struggles in the midst of machine warfare, and the slow path she treads to insanity through her driven hunger for knowledge and order in a world of illogic.
1. Chapter 1

**Hello! This will be a multi-chapter fic regarding the back story and life of Irina Spalko. For two reasons this story exists: to give Spalko the depth of character she deserved in the film although they didn't bother to give it to her, and to prove that an antagonist can have depth without being 'one of the good guys.' I loved Spalko's character, even though she strongly resembled Willy Wonka from the Tim Burton reboot (the resemblance is uncanny). But I thought she could have been made a more complex character and been developed further. So I've decided to to that. **

**Disclaimer: Obviously I don't own Indiana Jones. That franchise has been around since before I was born, and I don't have the cash to buy rights. And yeah, this probably doesn't protect me legally, but this is fanfiction and nobody cares about it enough to do something. I hope.**

"I must be mad," Irina Spalko whispered to herself, striding with confidence through the sea of boys. They looked the part of men, but she had learned through her two years of training that if she judged by character and not appearance, the Russian Army was made up of boys.

There were wolf whistles. There always were. Throw a woman -any woman between the ages of ten and thirty- into a room filled with war hardened, emotionally constipated adolescents, and there would be wolf whistles. Although the last person to make a move on her had paid dearly for it, this was whole new order of soldiers. She expected she would have to train this lot to stay away just as she had the last, only this time she would see them die and have to shove away the guilt over her attitude towards them.

Needless to say, it had been quite tempting to lie about her a marital status on all of her formal registration papers for the mission. It might have kept the crowd of wild animals quiet.

"The new captain has arrived," one of them crowed with a grin, to see how she reacted. She neither flinched, nor looked his way as she approached her quarters at the end of the hall. As long as she was wearing a commander's uniform, she might as well take advantage of it and snap her soldiers into line as soon as possible.

She rounded the corner, only to nearly run into another soldier on his way out. "You must be the new captain," he said, tipping his hat before brushing past her and out the door. She nearly smiled at the show of respect.

With her knowledge and unique skill set, she had gained leadership of an infiltration unit bound for Europe. Indeed, she must have been mad to accept such a title, but there would be a lieutenant to serve as her second-in-command and back her up when the soldiers got rowdy and decided that they did not want to listen to a woman.

Indeed, it was strange for a woman to be in the military, especially a woman of her age -she was older than most of the recruits- who were only schoolboys enlisting with big dreams, anyway- but not nearly old enough to be considered a politician in uniform. Nonetheless, she had a great deal more practical knowledge, and a number of political assets on her side.

For one, her father was in a good position with Stalin. He was the one who had put the idea of enlisting in her head in the first place, when she realized that university would not agree with her. After all, she was a visual learner -which was what had gotten her so far ahead of the other recruits so quickly. She had learned at a young age that she was hyper-observant, noticing every detail and deducing them all with a sharp mind.

Thus, she had become somewhat of an outcast to the other children when her skills were made known, for some thought her a witch and others thought her telepathic. She had never been a socially apt person, and she had greatly enjoyed their reactions. And so, the rumors went about until she was in complete isolation. Not even her teachers had known what to expect of her, for she had joyfully deduced their lives aloud on the first day of classes. No, university had not been an option.

Then Stalin had gotten word of her talents through her father's talk, and some strings had been pulled to get her into the military, where she had worked and trained to equal and then better the men in her units, until they feared she could injure them both mentally and physically.

It was too bad, she thought, that she would have to train a whole new batch of soldiers to feel that fear -it really was the only way she could keep their hands and voices off of her, unless she incapacitated them all. Which she was not by any means beyond doing, but she at least had a common sense of diplomacy.

She scanned her temporary quarters, memorizing every detail of the room. As she turned around, she could hear footsteps beside her, and she whirled around like a frightened cat to confront whoever dared to sneak up on her.

"Letter from the general, Captain. Instructions and information about the invasion." The recruit was small and young; no older than eighteen. He must have been a draftee, or else he would have seen a couple of birthdays on the front or died in the process.

She nodded to him curtly and took the paper, dismissing him with a small wave, but the soldier did not budge.

"Yes, Private?"

"There is a request to speak with you."

"From whom?"

"I-" He coughed. "I would like to speak with you."

"Very well then," she said without emotion. "What inquiries do you have?" If she were being truly honest with herself, she had little idea of what to do in such a position of command. She was used to taking over control, yet not to being handed control as if it were rightfully hers.

"Am I qualified to ask who your second-in-command is?"

"No." In truth, she didn't even know that herself, but she had been informed that he would arrive at the base camp the following day with orders and maps for the infiltration. They would be marching out two days after that. "Are there any other questions?"

He shook his head, and she brushed past him without another word. She had learned long ago that if she wanted men to respect her instead of ogling her she would have to make them fear her, because at the age of these soldiers nothing short of pure fear would force respect out of them for a woman barely older than themselves. So she left him with an icy glare and continued on her way, filing through the telegraphs he had delivered.

The first few were typical messages, detailing the old casualty reports and soldiers' records. The letter at the bottom of the stack, however, caught her attention. It was a telegram from the army post in western Ukraine, stating the arrival and information of her second-in-command.

"Well you have certainly made a name for yourself," she said to the documents, reading them over. The young man had ascended ranks nearly as fast as herself. He had been stationed in an area with mass casualties on his first deployment, so it was only natural that he had to take leadership eventually, but his superiors had certainly commended his brains.

Brains, she thought with a smirk, You don't see much of that around here. No one needed mental brilliance for the army. They only needed to be able to handle a rifle. All the schooling they'd ever had went out the window when they got into a trench and learned how to fire a machine gun. They didn't need such complex knowledge as maths and philosophy and psychology anymore. Trying to think deeper than the surface hurt their heads.

Spalko had sworn, when she had enlisted, not to lose her mind. She had seen soldiers go mad in the past. She knew what the war could do to people. But her mind was all she had. It was her everlasting tool. Most men kept themselves sane by suppressing logical thought. Spalko fed off of order and logic, allowing her thoughts to take control. If she tried to prevent herself from thinking any deeper about war, she would lose what sense of sanity she'd ever possessed. Which, she admitted to herself, had never been a lot.

Deep thought and conversation were not exercises many soldiers engaged in, especially during wartime. What scrambled most minds cleared hers up. It was no wonder she had easily isolated herself throughout her lifetime.

This lieutenant, she considered, looking over his papers one more time, He thinks in strategy. He thinks like me. Her mental gears were turning. If his skills matched her own, then they would be unstoppable. They could be the most skilled team of soldiers in the field.

It was a goal. A motivational force- something to focus on in the distance. And that was what she so needed at the moment.

So she brushed the wrinkles from her uniform, and stalked toward the bunkers, with the knowledge that success would depend on her soldiers, not just herself.

The bunkers were loud and disorganized, and she hated entering, but it had to be done. Any new captain had to establish their rules.

"Assemble!" she shouted into the makeshift houses. Nothing changed. "Soldiers, assemble!" she called again, but their raucous frivolity continued. Finally, Spalko kicked the door open.

"I said assemble," she hissed as eyes turned to her. But they did not move.

She approached their table, raising one dark eyebrow. "Poker?" she inquired skeptically, inspecting the cards on the table.

Private Arman appeared to be winning at the moment, and apparently he was also feeling quite audacious, because he shot her a cocky grin and said, "Strip poker, actually. Care to join?" He winked smugly.

Their former captain had been far too soft on them.

In a flash, Spalko had the young man pinned against the wall, her elbow inches from his face and his arm twisted behind his back.

"I could break your arm," she hissed softly, "if I so desired. But that would send you away to a military hospital, and I would be one man short. I might not be what you expected, Private. I may be a woman, but if you can't keep you're salacious comments to yourself then I will be the reason you piss your trousers in fear tonight."

It wasn't pretty, but it had to be done. Even as a woman in uniform, she had little to no respect from the daring young soldiers surrounding her. But respect, like rank and honor, could be earned. And she had every intention to do so, even if she had to smack a few men back into line. She only hoped her lieutenant would be a bit more cooperative.

She released the private, her icy blue eyes scanning the room. "Does anyone else have something they would like to say?" She spoke in a low, dangerous tone. They were all silent. Arman was trembling in his chair.

She turned away from them and left. "Rise early," she commanded, "Train early, and during midday you will be briefed as to this unit's assignment."

They watched her disappear from the bunker in silence.

**You should review. I will hypnotize you to review. Review. Review. Review. Review. Is it working? Review. Review. Review. Okay, I'll shut up now.**

**Also, thank you to my wonderful beta reader for sending this back to be before I went on vacation and brainstorming with me throughout the plotting process :)**


	2. Chapter 2

**Hello! This would be chapter two, in case you haven't guessed. At long last and after a good deal of writer's block, it is here.**

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She studied the map with every intent to begin their infiltration within the next couple of days. It would be necessary to radio General Stalin before beginning the mission, of course, but it had never hurt to plan ahead. Spalko traced a path from their outpost in Poland. They had been quite lucky, to even have taken this outpost. If it had been up to her, the infiltration unit wouldn't even have existed, and the army would have blasted their way to Berlin the same way the Germans had blasted their way to Leningrad. But she'd been given a break when they offered her a stealth job and the rank of Captain to do it. No more bunking with the soldier boys, the right to command respect; the job had appealed to her survival instinct.

A soft knock at the bunker doors caused her to look up from the plans. She was tempted to think it was one of her soldiers too intimidated to just walk in, but she knew better. It didn't matter whether they were scared of her or not; it was part of soldier etiquette to forget all the manners they learned before they were drafted. Not that she'd ever cared a great deal about manners, that is, until she had to beat someone's ass in her undergarments.

"Who goes there?"

"Your appointed second-in-command," came the response.

"You have permission to enter," she said stiffly, and the old door swung open.

If she was surprised by the young man, she did not show it. He seemed to have ascended the ranks from a draftee, only a couple years older than herself if she were to estimate. But his posture and demeanor were atypical for a soldier, especially one who had been drafted at age seventeen. Which, given the accolades he had received from other generals and the high rank he had achieved at at this age, was probably how old he had been when the drafts came.

He held out his hand, clutching a blue-gray crap in his other. "Damian Karov."

She shook his hand stiffly. "I know. You haven't spent much time on the front, have you Lieutenant Karov?"

"Why do you say that?"

"Most people who spend all their time being bombed and shot at wind up as damaged goods at some point. You seem relatively unbroken, compared to everyone else at this base."

He smirked. "For your information, I was at the front. I was lucky enough to receive a flesh wound that wasn't fatal and take a few months leave. Cleaned myself up before coming back, of course. What about you? You don't seem particularly damaged."

Spalko searched his words for any sort of coming on, but the man seemed genuine. She was unused to having no justified reason to despise a man her age and was not quite sure how to respond to his inquiries.

"I've taken a few shots myself. None particularly life threatening. Obviously we've both lived long enough out here to take command, so we probably can't say the same for our mental health. But that's a subject for another day."

She took a seat at the dimly lit desk and laid her maps across the table. "Come, we should discuss the infiltration."

Karov nodded and stood over her, tracing the units and their paths to Berlin with her finger. "I take it we'll be arriving in Germany before any other unit?"

"Indeed. We are, to put it bluntly, the guinea pigs. We gather intel on the German operations through stealth movement and report back to the General."

"I thought guinea pigs were supposed to be expendable."

"We're guinea pigs with machine guns. No one can be expendable when they have the latest in machine warfare technology standing behind them."

"So I see." He looked up from the paper, studying Spalko's face in the dim light. Her expression was inscrutable, her eyes narrow. Very little emotion was detectable through her complete concentration. Meeting his gaze, Spalko hardened her face.

"It is late," Karov began hesitantly, "I should be leaving. I apologize for my late arrival, but we were only permitted to travel after dark– a way of maintaining the security of the bunkers. We could bring no tanks in case we were discovered, though we carried an extra load of ammunition."

"It is of no concern, but I agree. You should be departing to your quarters." She stood abruptly and rolled up the maps, sliding them to one side of the table and lowering the light. "And I should be getting some sleep, before we have to brief the unit tomorrow."

"I will see you early, then," replied Karov, fitting his cap to his head and watching Spalko for an answer.

"You will. It was good to have met you, Lieutenant Karov."

"Good night, Captain." He strode out the door, not once looking back.

Spalko watched him go. Her eyebrows furrowed together in bemusement. He was certainly not the average soldier, and his demeanor had piqued her curiosity. There was a slight limp in his step, and she concluded that his leg had been shot in the past, and that was why he had taken leave. But obviously the wound had not impaired him in any way; otherwise he wouldn't be returning to the front after all this time.

But then, politics and desperation had driven many of the injured back to the front, against their will. The war was ending, but the deaths had taken their toll on the Russian government, and they certainly could not continue to drive back the Germans if all their soldiers were corpses on the battlefield.

Subconsciously, her hand drifted to her own battle scars, the bullet wounds on her collar bone and the burns from chemical weapons running up her left arm. These scars, like for any soldier, were the reason she couldn't go home and pretend the last few years hadn't happened. Not that Spalko was about to sink into denial. She was proud of her scars. They were proof she had survived- a woman leading a troop of men, still living and standing and breathing. Still fighting beyond the point where everyone thought she would have died.

She liked to think her scars would ward of potential suitors looking for influence with her father when she returned from war.

But then, she also liked to think she could ward them off without the scars.

Her thoughts were interrupted as the still-open door to her quarters let in the silhouette of a man.

"Captain?"

"Yes, Lieutenant Karov?"

The silhouette awkwardly rubbed the back of his neck. "It appears that we are sharing quarters."

"Excuse me?"

"No one informed me of this either."

"Probably because nothing ever happens around here. The men probably want to elicit a reaction." She shrugged her shoulders. "I gave up on prudishness when I joined the army, but a captain generally receives their own sleeping quarters."

"Short on rooms?"

"This is war, Karov. We create protocols for it and then abandon them as the situations arise. War is the definition of winging it and taking things as they come. Which is, apparently, what we are to do here. Fortunately, there is a second bunk, seeing as this room was originally meant for two or more to room in."

Karov lay his cap down on the desk and ran a hand through his hair, obviously unsure of what to do next.

"Oh, for God's sake, Lieutenant, just choose a damn bunk, strip your uniform and go to sleep. I'm not going to bite your head off, unless you pull something on me."

Spalko had a rather imperial demeanor, and having been recently dragged back into army etiquette, after a few months on leave where people were polite andaccommodating, Karov was probably suffering severe culture shock.

Spalko held up a finger. "If you do try something, Lieutenant, be aware that I sleep with my pistol, and I'm not beyond somnambulism," she threatened quietly, dimming the oil lamp until the bunker was completely dark. She could still see the gleam of her sword and allowed that to guide her to her own bunk.

She hadn't been quite serious about the somnambulism, she thought as she settled into the rough bed. But she was certainly an insomniac, and with the briefing tomorrow, the gears in her mind would never stop turning.

It was bound to be a long night.

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**Now then as I have established in my other fics, you should review to protest bags of air in the Lays industry. **


	3. Chapter 3

**Okay then! The third chapter, after a great deal of time. Shout out to my awesome beta reader LadyLini for her editing work and corrections and all such things :) and thanks to everyone who has reviewed. **

The unit marched westward under cover of darkness, bringing only the provisions they needed to reach the next encampment. Spalko and Karov brought up the rear, making sure they could not be tailed. She had confidence that, in spite of their clear lack of common sense, her soldiers were smart enough to see a frontal ambush before the firing started.

"Where were you stationed before this?" Karov inquired, adjusting a pack and rifle over his shoulder.

"A rather quiet outpost outside Moscow."

"The Petrov base?"

It clicked in her mind. "Yes, that's the one."

"There was a great deal of fighting there early on."

Spalko sighed. "I suppose so, but how are we even to tell when the war started? The whole thing is rather foggy, if you ask me. I simply consider the war to have begun when I made it my business to be involved in."

"That's a self-important stance on things."

"Well, it makes it easier to be angry when you're staring out over a field of old corpses frozen over by early snow."

"Was the Petrov base really that grim?" Karov's eyebrows shot up in surprise. He had seen the base once before it was attacked, but it had only been a resting station in a westward march of troops into Southeastern Ukraine. It had been his very first assignment in the military. (There was an extra quotation mark here.)

Spalko sighed, her eyes seeming to shadow as she remembered her recent experience at the destroyed bunkers, its lingering sense of horror engrained in her mind. "Indeed, it was. There is no time for mass burials when you're under fire. There is no time to mourn, nor identify your dead. The few survivors, as I'm told, were forced to flee. We were the next group to enter, the outpost having been abandoned for four years. If you step on a skull, you're supposed to shake it from your boots and walk on." Her eyes hardened. "It is easy to become lost in the grief. So instead you focus on your anger. I began to think that if I had been there, then perhaps I could have strategized better and saved the base. My whole judgement of time began to revolve around when I entered the war.

"I think the Germans cheated, invading us before the war had even officially started and even though I know that's not completely true, the thought angers me. It drives me to keep fighting."

Karov clapped her shoulder affectionately. "There's no honor in war anymore."

"I know," she sighed, deliberately shoving away his hand, "It is an unfortunate side effect of the development of machine warfare. But that's okay, because there is no honor in vengeance either, and I'm Hell bent on exacting my revenge upon the troops who destroyed the Petrov base and slaughtered everyone in it. So I suppose it's good that modern warfare has no honor, because now I don't have to worry about upholding my own honor in the face of mass destruction."

Spalko chuckled bitterly, catching the eye of her second-in-command.

"You know," he said, "you have a pretty cynical outlook on life."

"The price of wisdom."

He snorted. "Pessimism is wisdom now. How marvelous. I suppose then, that I have none of it."

"Very little, but I'm sure you'll grow wiser as the battles go on. After all, there are only so many dead bodies you can look upon without growing a little more world-weary."

She was joking, the bitterness of army humor shining through her grimace- the closest she had yet come to a smile in anyone's presence, her lips a tight line of harbored knowledge sealed away from prying eyes. Every soldier cracked jokes about their deceased; it was only army etiquette, as Spalko had taken to calling it. But her sarcasm was not necessarily humor. It was, after all, the truth. It just had a way of tumbling from her lips, so that it could be taken as a sardonic sense of humor and not an expression of dislike towards humans themselves.

She didn't much care for humans anyway. Individually, it was harder. The lines between indifference and comradeship were blurred. But as a species, she could very easily dislike humanity, after the horrors she had seen them inflict upon each other.

She watched Karov's expression shift as he tried to decipher the tone behind her words. She relished in his confusion. If she alienated herself, she could suppress any sense of personal fondness toward her lieutenant, and thus not be wracked with grief when he died. It was a methodical approach to survival at war that she had developed the minute she set foot in the Petrov base and felt her brain sacrifice control to her emotions. And if there was one thing Spalko hated, it was not being in control of herself.

Tired of watching him squirm internally, she resumed the conversation. "And where were you stationed before your leave of absence?"

It was a trick question. She knew exactly where he had been stationed from the file sent to her before he arrived. But she wanted to hear him talk about his former comrades. If she were being honest, she simply wanted to hear him talk in general. Because if she were being honest, as much as she disliked people, she was equally fascinated by them. The way their minds worked, those gears turning and turning, often just to come to the wrong conclusion and make assumptions based on circumstantial evidence. She loved to analyze and organize their behaviors, to study them like science experiments until she could predict their next moves and quite nearly read what they were thinking.

She could tell everyone all about themselves if she so desired, but no good captain ever revealed his or her best weapon before the battle had begun.

"I was stationed in western Ukraine to prevent the Germans from finding another invasion path."

"They didn't get the chance, did they?"

"A small scout unit lost their asses trying, but it was nothing to be frightened of. Hitler was already losing his resources and at that point."

Spalko wrinkled her nose. "They would have lost a lot more than that if I had been there."

"You're from Ukraine?"

"Farther east. But yes, I am, though I rather consider myself to be from the Soviet Union. I take it your guard unit didn't see much fighting?"

"Why do you say that?"

"If you saw the front you would be as cynical as me," she said dryly, fingering the pistol in its holster at her hip. It was a habit she had developed after almost being shot in an ambush a couple of years prior. It was reassuring to feel the presence of a lethal weapon on her person, and Spalko was always weary of attack.

"I would be, though I would probably still be a little more friendly."

"Probably so." Her tone of finality suggested she was done talking, so he fixed his eyes ahead, his gaze hardening into the cold trees.

It was the movement that caught his eye, soon after the panicked shouts of 'ambush!' and the sudden disarray that struck the band.

Spalko whipped out her pistol and fired off as many shots as she could manage into the tree line, before lowering her pack and ducking behind the truck.

"Remind me," she hissed, "who's idea was it to bring a whole truck of provisions with us to the next outpost?"

"Someone of higher rank than you," whispered Karov harshly beside her.

"The engine bellows so loudly they can probably hear it for miles around."

"Or we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Duck!"

Spalko ducked her head, dropping to her knees in time to see Karov take out a German soldier behind her.

"Thanks," she growled, spinning around and firing off a couple more shots. Her aim was remarkable when she had a clear view of what she was shooting, but it was best to be safe when it came to covering your back.

"You're welcome," said Karov, craning his neck to see behind him. "That's what a lieutenant is for."

"Actually, I think a lieutenant exists to take over when the acting commander dies." Spalko peered around the side of the truck, taking it to be clear, and gestured for Karov to follow her. They stepped silently around to the front, where most of the shooting was taking place. She counted two of her soldiers down- which was considerably lucky for a caravan taken by surprise- and thirty still standing. They had been a small unit, as their goal was infiltration and not open troop warfare.

She had removed the larger rifle from where it hung on her pack and cocked it quickly, firing into the fray. She could pick out the enemy soldiers quite well, her eyes flicking about and catching the slight differences in uniform color or the shape of their caps. She would have time for remorse later, when the implications of humans killing each other without honor came back to bite her.

And even then, it wasn't so much remorse for what she had done as mourning over what had become of humanity, herself included. She never mourned the men she killed- her connections to them were impersonal and as long as she never took time to watch their faces still, she could remain emotionally detached.

"Captain?" The firing had nearly come to a cease; the ambush had been small, simply a band of men to attack anyone who passed on the road. She turned to see Karov, sporting a nasty graze on his arm, but no major injuries.

"You are wounded."

He grimaced at the blood soaking into his uniform. "So I am. But not incapacitated."

"Nor am I. We should gather our own. Take names and ranks."

He nodded stiffly. "Indeed."

Spalko spun on her heel and left to take the roll of her dead and her survivors, speaking to each individually to make sure he understood the universal message: assemble for our own safety.

The group assembled quickly, their rowdy behavior of the previous days sobered by the sudden witness to loss of life. Before, the notion of death had been just that: a notion. Now, it was a living possibility, breathing down their necks. They had seen the effects of a couple flying bullets, and it was just beginning to sink into their minds.

Karov stood beside his captain, hands clasped behind his back, watching Spalko for further orders.

"Dismissed. Keep moving," she commanded. "Stay in formation." And the caravan continued how it was supposed to, without another word.

"I'm taking advantage of their fear while I can," she explained. "Discussing what just happened will disrupt the order. They will have time to grieve when we reach our next camp."

Karov dipped his head. He had no right to question her decisions as captain, even if they seemed devoid of pity or emotion.

But he couldn't resist a friendly jest. "Not going to let them think you're soft, are you Captain?"

She continued looking straight ahead as she replied, "I have to keep up appearances."

"Truly, Captain, your wit rivals your beauty."

There was silence, but through the darkness he swore he could see her smile.

**Well then... gosh Spalko is so much fun to write. The awful (and kind of wonderful) thing is that I get to project my own sarcasm onto this character with little repercussion. So anything generally pessimistic that I wouldn't say out loud gets thrown into a bit of dialogue in this fic. **

**Well, not everything. But... some things.  
**


	4. Chapter 4

**Well then. It's been a while, to say the least. I've been enjoying writing easy parodies and silliness and have left this untouched for a few weeks. But some spare time presented itself and suddenly ideas were sparking in my head. **

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"I can't believe you took a bullet for me."

Karov grimaced as the army doctor bound the gunshot wound on his arm. "It really only grazed me," he corrected, examining the damage done.

Spalko tightened her grip on his forearm as the doctor sealed the bandages. "You're damn lucky it did, too. You very well could have died, and then I would be one man short."

"That's really all you worry about, isn't it?" said Karov; his tone was jocular, but it came through clenched teeth, "One man short."

To this Spalko did not respond. She hadn't visited Karov in the infirmary for a friendly chat. If she were truly honest with herself, she'd been worried about him, and simply the notion of sentimentality in a war environment, especially toward her lieutenant, was enough to make her uneasy. Emotion did not mix well with an easily compromised mission and an already massive casualty rate for their country.

But then her mind would play back the short battle, and the bullet flying toward them would reappear, slowing down so that she could see its rotation in the air and her own ignorance of its path before Karov shoved her aside, the bullet slicing through the seams of his tunic sleeve and grazing his arm. She would watch herself turn around, eyes wild with the light of battle, cogs snapping into place in her head as she subconsciously prepared to take lives without a second thought.

It was at times like this that she did not know whether she possessed a gift or a curse in her impeccable memory.

She was proud; it was a trait she disliked about herself for its disadvantage in hostile situations, and especially in a tight negotiation. But she was no fool. She had been held hostage before, and not holding back her witty remarks had nearly gotten her tongue chopped off. Her skills had gotten her off the hook that day, but she knew a day would come when her particular skill set wouldn't be able to help her.

And that day, it would be her allies who saved her ass.

She looked Lieutenant Karov up and down, bullet wound, dusty face and all. She had known him for little more than a week or two, but he already felt like a real second-in-command would. She trusted him to have her back, at least. And that was something she couldn't say for every other second she'd had in the military and the majority of her superior officers. After all, she wouldn't exactly call herself a trusting person.

In truth, she could feel the anxiety for Karov's safety coiling in her belly, and she disliked that worry, only having known the man for three weeks, two of which they had spent traveling to their outpost in Poland.

They had only arrived the other day, and for fear of infection, Karov had seen the medic. They would be in the best shape possible before the stealth mission began. Or at least, as stealthy as they could be with guns and dynamite.

"You're free to go," said the doctor, looking up from the bandages he had wrapped around Karov's upper arm with an expression of satisfaction, "You'll heal fine, but make sure to change those bandages at night." He gestured to the wrapped wound, then left to check on other patients, smoothing out the small cot for the next injury as he went.

"Thank you, Doctor," Karov dipped his head in appreciation as Spalko stalked toward the door, eager to leave the infirmary. Her mind was overwhelmed with sights, focusing on every small detail in the room and analyzing it thoroughly.

"I'm afraid the man who lost his foot will not make it," she stated, her voice frank and devoid of pity, "But the private with the bullet wound in his shoulder will survive."

"How do you know?" asked Karov, buttoning his uniform over the bandages.

"I observe, Lieutenant." She never quite looked him in the face, her sharp blue eyes always focusing straight ahead as she strode back toward the main encampment.

Silently, Karov studied her face in the evening light. Her features were sharp and intimidating, her hair well groomed and knotted tightly in the back of her head. By all appearances, she was the hard commander that her soldiers needed to keep them in line and the dangerous officer with a mind like a falcon and heart like an ice box.

So he did what she told him to. He observed, searching beneath the masks and layers she kept up to demand respect. He saw how her features softened with relief when the doctor informed him that he would be perfectly fine and needed no further treatment. He saw the corners of her lips lift slightly in the dark whenever she said something particularly witty and he followed it up with a quip of his own.

And he was quite sure she noticed when he called her beautiful; true, he had been offering up a clever remark, but within it he had concealed a statement he thought was true. Even if it was roundabout, he always tried to speak his mind. Spalko valued his convictions, after all, but he wasn't sure she would be willing to hear a personal comment. He wasn't even sure he would be willing to accept such thoughts within himself anyway.

They stopped in the general's tent to turn in the official report regarding the ambush they had walked into during their journey. He nodded to them, nothing out of the ordinary, despite the fact that Spalko had deliberately put off giving him the report until after she had assured herself that Lieutenant Karov would heal quickly. The general, she thought with a grimace, was too busy with his whiskey and cigarettes to mull over reports as the hours passed him by.

She knew if it had been her captain turning in a late report, she would have reprimanded them, no matter the circumstances. But that was a matter she chose not to dwell on, because she was not in such a position, and in war it was no use pondering over what could possibly have happened, were the circumstances different. What mattered were the facts.

But that didn't stop her from receding into her bunker for the evening with a cigarillo of her own and enough candlelight to analyze her relationship with Karov before her heart got the best of her head. She might have managed to overanalyze until her emotions faded away and her mind regained its dominance, had Karov himself not entered the bunker and interrupted her train of thought.

She opened her eyes, watching him close the door as quietly as he could between the tips of her black boots propped up on the table. Her eyes followed him as he hung his overcoat on a bunk and sat down beside it, tapping his thumbs together on his lap.

She doubted he had noticed her presence until she made it known.

"Putting the soldiers to bed, Lieutenant?" she asked dryly through her cigarillo smoke, arching one eyebrow and finding some dark form of satisfaction in the way he jumped up in surprise at the sound of her voice. Her lips twisted into a wry smirk as he sucked in a breath to calm himself, but she remained motionless in the corner, cigarette now tucked between her fingers, and the smell of smoke and molten wax settling in the air.

"We are once again to share a bunker, Captain," he replied, still recovering his wits.

She smoothed her features to show no surprise. "Is this to become a normal thing now, or are they simply running out of space?"

"Most likely the latter, Captain."

Without a word, Spalko got up from her chair and made to crank the small generator that would provide some light for their bunker. As opposed to their first outpost, this one had electricity, if not a great deal of it.

"If I may ask, why were you in candlelight if you could have electricity?"

Spalko stopped turning the crank as lights flickered on above them. "It was dimmer, and I prefer to have a certain degree of darkness if I'm trying to think."

She watched as the Lieutenant shed his shirt, examining the bandages. "I should probably change these, shouldn't I?"

"Did he tell you to?"

"Yes."

"Then you should." In most cases she would allow a bit of extra time to pass before changing bandages, but she didn't want Karov to worsen or his wound to get infected.

He looked down at the bandage ruefully. "Damn," he said with a light chuckle. She could see the slight flicker of fear pass over his face, as if it had just barely hit him that he could very well have died. That fact, of course, had crossed Spalko's mind hours before, but she understood that it took time for such possibilities to sink in.

"That is correct, Lieutenant," was all she said as she studied his expression carefully. He, in turn, scrutinized the dressing of the bullet wound, then reached with one arm to pull it off. He wasn't getting very far; he only had one hand to put to use.

Rolling her eyes at his incapability, Spalko strode over to her second-in-command and sat down beside him. "Allow me, Lieutenant Karov."

With the precision of a surgeon, Spalko unwound the gauze and tossed it onto the bunker floor. Karov winced slightly, muscles contracting, and she shot him a glare before laying eyes on the flesh wound. The bullet hadn't gone straight into his arm, and a wave of relief washed over her that she suppressed, fully aware that he had assured her earlier that it had only grazed him.

However, it had certainly left its mark, and a nasty one at that. It had torn a deep cut in his skin, red and rough with drying blood.

"Another scar for the collection, eh?" Karov piped up, his voice slightly hoarse with exhaustion. They had only arrived about noon that day, and the constant traveling had taken its toll on the entire unit.

"I'm sure my scar collection is far more impressive, but I'll allow you to indulge in your pride while I bind this for you," muttered Spalko, "Gauze please."

"In the pocket of my overcoat."

She narrowed her eyes at him once more before fetching the bandages from his uniform coat. Walking back to his bed, she spotted the radio in the corner and turned it on. On most occasions, she loathed the radio. It disrupted her thinking with nonsense and static. She didn't know what possessed her to turn it on now, but the slow swing now resonating in the bunker was soothing to her nerves. Her teeth stopped gnawing the cigarette. She hadn't realized she'd been biting it so hard in the first place. She hated when she couldn't agree with herself; it felt awkward and off balance, like she walked with a cane and spoke with a whistle.

Still without a word, she rebound his arm, pinning the dressings so they wouldn't come undone and blowing cigarillo dust into his face as if disregarding what would be considered manners in normal society would ease her mind through the war.

"There," she finished, her voice husky through the thick smoke, "That should be better."

He craned his neck to see the binding, and nodded. "Thank you."

Her head had just barely reared to regain control when her emotions decided they would act before they were overcome.

Irina Spalko was anything but impulsive. She never acted without weighing every variable and considering every effect her decision could have. She was unsure still what piece of her mind thought to do exactly what it did, but it saw an opportunity and took it before her logical side could regain control.

And she doubted she would have done it, had Karov not been leaning toward her in an attempt to be subtle. And she wouldn't have done it, had he not been so damn clean, by army standards. Certainly, showers were a rare privilege, and one got used to being dusty, but with fresh bandages, his kind face, rough with stubble and a few nicks, he was far more tidy than their compatriots.

And after she had acted- now that they were, in fact, passionately kissing like they were going to die tomorrow, (and as far as either of them were concerned, that was a likely possibility) she was weighing such variables.

And after the variables come the inevitable outcomes. A superior officer could separate them for an inappropriate relationship. She, Karov or both of them could die. Or, they left the military and lived a civilian life. But that was out of the question entirely. No option sounded pleasurable, despite whatever short term arrangement they may conjure up.

So, she parted from her lieutenant, lips swollen and eyes alight with some form of adrenaline, and allowed her logical mind to take over once more.

"This will not be spoken of," she decided aloud after a moment's thought, her cigar back between her teeth. Karov had reclaimed his dusty shirt. "Are we clear, Lieutenant Karov?"

His voice was as hard as hers; he had obviously foreseen the same obstacles to their affections for one another. If someone had entered the room right then, they could not have guessed as to what had happened seconds previous.

"Clear as day, Captain Spalko."

* * *

**I did get a bit indulgent at the end. Reviews brighten my day! Make potato chips, not air :)**


	5. Chapter 5

**Hello there, I'm back, after a long break during which time my life has gotten infinitely more stressful. However I still intend to keep this fic up, and bear with me because this chapter is a more thought and less action. But I promise that next chapter we'll get a whole lot of action, so this is the calm before the storm, so to speak. A lot of build up. **

**Anyways, thank you so much to all the people who are still reading :) and to my lovely beta reader for sticking with me, even when I send her messy rough drafts that I finish right before I go to bed.**

Irina Spalko liked to think, and to force others into doing the same. She liked to watch them flounder for an answer, as if their ignorance was built for her entertainment. So why, she wondered, was she so drawn to her lieutenant?

Perhaps it was because Karov provided something different; a brand of variety that stood out to her amidst the grim monotony of military life. He put thought into her rhetorical, existential questions, considering them as if she had not just been speaking aloud to prevent her tidy mind from becoming clouded with information. He responded to her cynical commentaries with quips of his own, rivaling her in wit.

She had mulled over that very question for at least six nights, staring at the bunker ceiling and counting every groove in the wood as she listened to Karov breath in the neighboring bunk. Undoubtedly, the arrangements of the military had something to do with it. Spalko was no fool; she could see the change in her soldiers' behavior whenever they marched through a town and laid eyes on some innocent young woman waving from a crowd. Their eyes would widen and they would shout innuendos, desperately hoping for their gestures to be reciprocated.

She herself had never suffered from such menial afflictions of the heart, but she had spent enough time casually observing those around her to come to the conclusion that humans could not survive without some degree of physical affection. The ordered absence of that affection by superiors, and by the general lack of females in the military led to increased desires. It was the reason she had to set her soldiers straight whenever she walked into a room to address them as a group.

Strip poker, she remembered, scoffing at their juvenile conduct as she assembled her gun, preparing to lead her unit's first official mission of stealth. She could feel the cold metal against her side as she slipped it into its holster, knowing it would always be at her side in times of need. Her gun was the only constant in her life - she could always rely on it to have her back if the situation got messy, and it never misfired.

Which, she thought grimly, brought her back to the question of Lieutenant Karov. It seemed to her a simple task, to pretend that they had not been desperately grasping at each others' faces three days previous, quenching for a short time their starvation for physical intimacy that the isolation of war had bred within every soldier.

She stepped out of her bunker, her eyes scanning the clearing where their soldiers had made camp, searching for Karov. He had left early to retrieve maps of the area, forthe purpose of scouting out places where the Germans could prepare an ambush.

"Captain, we're loading the trucks!" The voice belonged to Private Arman, whom she recognized from her first day as a unit commander. She almost felt pleased that he'd survived so long. She dipped her head in acknowledgement, watching him climb into one of the trucks in the caravan. There was always something about being able to place a voice to a person and a moment in time that brought on sentimentality. It was one of the little things that forced her to retain some form of emotion, despite her best attempts at becoming resigned to death and destruction.

She supposed that Lieutenant Karov was another of those things; not just a familiar name and face but a constant prick in her side. She was not quite sure that she could be as unaffected by his death as she would like, were such an event to occur. It unnerved her, even frightened her to the point of discombobulation. It was a subtle but deep-rooted fear of her own attraction which she had never before experienced.

Spalko stalked over to the green car that headed their caravan, preparing to enter a town in Austria. She had made no effort to learn its name, because the war had all but destroyed it. No use fueling her emotions, building a personal connection to the place through its identity. They were making a risky move, but the invading troops had managed to secure a small camp inside the town yet undiscovered by German soldiers. From there Spalko's unit was to begin their infiltration.

As she climbed into the passenger seat of the jeep, she deliberately avoided making eye contact with the driver. She had grown more weary of sentiment ever since it had seized control over her actions and led to a heated, pent-up kiss between herself and her appointed second-in-command. Looking someone in the eye was an easy way to become attached to them, even impersonally. Ever since the Petrov base, she had sworn away that form of attachment.

Behind her, Karov climbed over the door and perched in the backseat, holding his rifle aloft. "You never know what we might run into," he said, his tone bearing some slight form of humor. Yet his voice was stiff, as it always was when he addressed Spalko. He too was aware of the electric current pulsing between them; the result of years without physical intimacy - a physiological need in order to survive, especially the harsh conditions they had been living under during the war.

As the engines started up and the caravan snaked it way out of their base camp, Spalko allowed her eyes to drift for one moment to Karov, sitting upright and watching the road ahead for even the slightest signs of ambush. There was no doubt he was focused, but she also did not doubt he could see her, studying his every move with sharp eyes and a mind for detail.

Romantic trysts were not unheard of in the army, yet the rarity of female officers prevented them from becoming a common occurrence. She could recall one instance - somewhat of a legend for officers in training, laying down the consequences of such an inappropriate relationship. A young soldier, no older than nineteen, eloped with a nurse in his unit shortly before the Germans invaded Leningrad. They both died in the invasion; their legacy only one of great irony, for she died by a bullet and he of illness and infection.

True, it was only a legend to frighten soldiers from impregnating, and thus incapacitating, nurses in a time of great need for anyone practiced in medicine. Yet their tale was a cautionary one, and their lack of identity allowed every soldier to imagine himself in the place of the boy who died in Leningrad.

She almost cringed while recalling the story, before schooling her features into their customary scowl. She had a strict reputation to uphold amongst her soldiers, and a dangerous mission to accomplish, neither of which fear or friendliness would help her to complete.

Her fingers fumbling as the jeep bounced along a rough patch in the road, Spalko lit a cigarillo and mourned the lack of darkness and silence that prevented her from truly taking her feelings into consideration. She could mull all she wanted over such matters, but here it would accomplish nothing. Better to wallow in a personal cloud of smoke than force herself to think further when she knew she would come upon neither solutions nor revelations.

"Captain?" Karov addressed her in the same flat tone, devoid of the passion he had always spoken with in the past.

"Yes, Lieutenant?"

The vehicle bumped over a pot hole, and Karov steadied himself before continuing. "What is the name of our destination?"

Of course he asked such a question, because he knew Spalko could not tell him the answer. He understood her philosophies about war. He was only trying to vex her further, and disliked the sudden pressure and heat in her face that came along with her irritation.

"Do you enjoy the feeling of grief, Lieutenant?" she shot back, mirroring his monotone. "Do you like looking at rubble and ruins and feeling some tight connection to the place, because you know its name and what it was before it became rubble? Because the town we're going to has a lot of rubble. Whole buildings that are nothing but piles of stone. Now we have one simple task: navigate the ruins and the surviving structures to find evidence of enemy soldiers before we advance. Would you rather go through arbitrary piles of rock and cement or places that once stood with names, and meanings, and purposes now reduced to those arbitrary piles? Because the latter sounds a hell of a lot more painful to me."

To this, Karov did not respond, for he had no answer to such an outburst.

Her voice had taken on the harshness of an experienced general, who had seen so much death he wondered how she still kept on doing what she did. She realized then that the world-weary gleam in his eyes and the catch in this throat didn't come from how many people he'd seen dead and injured but which people he saw dead and injured.

It was for this reason, and these broken men, that Captain Irina Spalko had no inclination to develop feelings of any nature toward other officers. The lack of control she possessed over everything that had transpired after Karov had been shot had frightened her. She basked in the efficiency of her own mind, even relied on it, and to retain that mind in such an extreme environment, she needed to stay detached.

The road seemed to blur by, time compressing as her thoughts unwound at an incomprehensible rate.

Some time later, she felt Karov's hand on her shoulder, tapping her sharply to drag her mind back to the present. "Captain?"

"Yes, Lieutenant?"

"We have arrived."

She lifted her chin, swinging over the passenger side door and taking her first steps in the ruins of a settlement, her gaze sweeping over what was left of the town. "So we have."

**Well then, hope you enjoyed. The next chapter will be up who knows when, but it WILL be up. I promise. Pinky swear. And it'll be more interesting.**


	6. Chapter 6

**Well well, it has been a while, hasn't it? I was feeling indulgent and decided to provide you with some more logical thinking and shameless romance. And, you know, a little action. Because you can't develop a romance without some sort of action to go with it; otherwise it's just boring. But yes, I present the latest chapter. Great thanks to my beta reader, as always, for wading through this mess. Also, trigger warning. Death of a child. But nothing graphic, I promise. I don't do graphic death scenes.**

The town was as close to rubble as it could be while still remaining recognizable. As she scanned the area, fingers wrapping around the handle of her gun, Spalko could see the Petrov base in the back of her mind. It had looked just like this; like another Pompeii reduced to ruin by fire in the sky.

Drawing in a deep breath and crumbling her cigarette between her fingers, she called her unit to attention, keeping Karov beside her. "For this task we will divide you into two groups. One will case the West side, one the East. Our armed air forces bombed this town, but because it is still technically on German grounds, we must do a clean sweep for any enemy encampments or surviving German soldiers in the town itself. 2nd Lieutenant Aleksander will accompany the Eastern division. Myself and Lieutenant Karov will case the West. Shoot any German soldiers you see. There is no room for hesitation or an ethical debate on this mission."

This was war, she reminded herself bitterly, not justice.

"Are we clear?"

There was no collective chorus of agreement or displeasure, only silence. The boys standing in line before her knew the horrors they were about to witness. Spalko herself had seen them on her last assignment. Now it was their turn. But by the lift of their chins, she knew they understood her orders and would carry them out, despite fear or reservations. At the very least, she had frightened them enough to keep them in line.

She quickly divided her unit into two groups, equally matched in strength. They had practiced formations that would protect the weakest, and if hostiles approached, they could easily put their training to use.

With gestures, she forced them to fan out, picking about the rubble for any signs of enemy soldiers. That was their job, as guinea pigs, after all- to stake out the road ahead before a caravan came though and prevent an ambush like the one they had experienced while travelling to their base camp.

The sky was thick with smog, and the air smelled like smoke. Not the warm, calming smoke that rose from her cigarettes and candles in the bunker, but the rough smoke, tinted with the stench of charred flesh that seeped into her nostrils and down her throat, making her cough slightly through the silence.

She watched Karov to her left, no more than a silhouette in the smog and rubble. It was indeed like venturing through Pompeii, but in the very days after its burial. Everywhere, signs of life peeped out from under the dust; a broken vase here, a torn piece of clothing there, even a pair of crushed, charred eyeglasses crunched beneath her boots as she walked. She had not seen such destruction as this since her time at the Petrov base.

She was almost pleased, however, that her confusion regarding her feelings for Lieutenant Karov were drifting away from her mind. She did not know which she preferred- the wracking memories of the Petrov base or emotional turmoil.

In either case, she preferred at moments like these to focus on the present and the details laid out before her, telling her a story of exactly what had happened.

But before the ruins could speak, a choked cry sounded, only a few meters in front of her. Narrowing her eyes, Spalko lifted her pistol from its holster, sure that it would be far more effective than an automatic gun at close range.

By now, the rest of her team was too far off to investigate the sound. She hoped desperately that it was not a dying German soldier, for she did not want to be the one burdened with a moral conflict.

She supposed, though, in the case that it was, she would probably shoot him no matter how severe his injuries were. Better to put him out of his misery. Any soldier still alive would sustain serious physical damage, and if not that, serious psychological damage. It would be the most honorable decision to kill him, rather than allow his scars and memories to eat him alive.

But then, Spalko was not one to speak of honor.

Drawing ever closer, she identified the source of the soft cries as coming from the remains of a residential building. Its fireplace was still standing above the walls, worn down to the barest stone.

She rounded the building with her finger on the trigger, only to nearly drop her gun in shock, for she had come face to face with a girl no more than eight years old.

The child was barely recognizable as human through the dirt that caked her face and body, although she didn't appear to have sustained any serious injuries. For a moment, Spalko froze, her eyes wild and almost fearful. Of all the circumstances she had planned for on this mission, this was not one of them, and the lack of a pre-meditated procedure in her mind left her reeling.

Still tightly holding her gun, her lips tight with sudden anxiety, she looked the little girl up and down. She was clutching a torn doll the way Spalko held her pistol, her eyes wide and pale blue, like a ghost's, and a tangled mess of dark hair framed her terrified expression.

Her lip quivered, but she held her dusty chin up stubbornly. "What do you want?" she demanded, as if she not just been weeping in the ruins of a house. It was clear from her face she wanted the captain to believe she was strong. She had nothing to lose that she had not already lost, and Spalko suspected she didn't quite know what to feel yet.

She opened her mouth to speak, but words failed her. How did she interact with a child, surrounded by dust and ashes? Silently, she lowered her gun. She wanted to turn, to walk away and declare the area clear, but she couldn't move. Something in this unknown girl's eyes caught her and held her in place. There was a depth to her, a broken sense of courage that she knew all too well.

"Go away," the child whispered, clinging more tightly to her doll. "You're in charge of the mean men with guns. Leave me alone. Please." It wasn't so much a plead as it was a demand, and Spalko knew then that she couldn't obey. She wanted to; oh, how she wanted to turn around and walk away and pretend she had never seen this child. But some force deep within her, buried beneath the walls she had built when she entered the war, tugged her back each time she tried to look away.

She didn't remember her childhood as well as most. But looking into this girl's eyes, teared up and frightened but still so stubborn and proud, she recognized herself. And so she crouched on the embers and held out a callused hand.

"What is your name?" Spalko inquired, in as soft a voice as she could manage.

The girl pouted. "Natalya," she mumbled almost inaudibly.

"I don't want to hurt you," she said. "Let me take you away from here."

"But you have a gun," she insisted stubbornly, and Spalko sighed, reluctantly letting go of the gun that she valued as much as this child valued her doll. It was her own security blanket.

With slight hesitation, the girl came forward, burying herself in the arms of the military commander, and there was a slight flush of satisfaction that coiled in Spalko's chest that she- a cold army captain- had convinced a broken child to trust her.

Still carrying Natalya, she finished her sweep and called her men back to the truck. She said nothing to them of the child who's hand she held gently, although she received many confused glances from her soldiers.

They had found few other survivors, all of whom were German militants shot upon sight just as she had commanded. For a moment Spalko wondered how she could be so invested in the life of one girl, yet feel no pity for the men who had died and left their blood on her hands.

But war, she reminded herself, was anything but logical. And true justice didn't exist.

Karov, to her surprise, shot her a grin as she helped the child into an army car.

"I didn't know you had a soft spot," he said, eyes twinkling, and she glared at him, no retort coming to her mind. But he didn't take his gaze off of her until Natalya was safely in the caravan car, and she had requested that the driver return her to the nearest safe town. For a moment she had felt the overwhelming urge to simply bring her back to the base camp, before her logical mind had kicked in and she had taken into consideration the constant peril of being in a war zone with two units of soldiers on the offensive.

As they rounded the perimeter of the city, shots rang out in the cars in front of them, which was bringing refugees to a neighboring town. Indeed, the German reinforcements had arrived to scout out the territory that still technically belonged to them, and Spalko cursed herself for not ordering her men out more quickly. They were an infiltration unit, not organized for hostile engagement of enemy troops. She snapped at their truck's driver and jumped from the car, loading her automatic gun as she moved.

She picked off the Germans one by one, catching their movement through the haze. She wiped sweat from a small cut in her brow, her eyes darting between her own men and the Nazi soldiers. The thought flickered into her mind that these men were not so unlike her own troops; too young to be fighting, too eager to hold a weapon, too lost in the romanticism of war to see how cynical it actually is. At least, though, the cynicism was what drove her to ignore the voices of reservation that every so often decided to make an appearance.

A searing pain ripped through her shoulder from behind, and she clenched her teeth, dropping to her knees and leaning against the back of the truck. Propping her gun up on the good shoulder she had left, she opened fire against whoever had seen fit to shoot her. Revenge was always the best motive, because could easily morph it into some twisted form of justice and pardon her subsequent actions.

The shouts and gunshots of war were no less familiar to her than simple conversation by now. Her own nonchalance was only a worn response to the monotony of small skirmishes. Death had been reduced to facts and numbers; life to dumb luck and a few extra bullets. Every so often she would wonder distantly who was alive and who was not, keeping herself removed from the situation, but her reaction to battle had long ago become no more than practical thinking.

Now, however, she disliked the burning anxiety that had taken root in her chest as Natalya's face lingered in her mind. Had she been shot? Was she still alive? There was no emotion overcoming her, threatening to spill, yet the slightest discomfort at the prospect of death Spalko considered to be suicide. She had trained herself to survive on only logic and observation, but there was something in the child, something warm and familiar, that she thought she had lost.

In the silence that followed the skirmish, she climbed back into her own truck, clutching the bullet wound in her shoulder. "Drive," she ordered the man at the wheel. "Back to camp."

She could not place the feeling, but as she gnawed at her bottom lip, she felt Karov's hand slip tentatively over her own.

"I don't know if she's alive," he said simply, for that was the truth.

"I have no intent to look into the question," she replied, keeping her tone even.

"It looks good on you."

Her eyes narrowed skeptically. "Excuse me, what?"

"Compassion. It looks good on you. Makes you a little more human."

"And?" She lifted an eyebrow, watching the slight twitch in his lips. He was itching to say something else, but he was unsure whether it would be a wise decision to say it. "What?" she asked sharply, her voice cracking slightly, hoarse in the dry air.

"The child. You look good with a child. Like heroes in the old war stories."

Her breath hitched slightly, remembering the type of story they told in training. Tales of bravery and heroic sacrifice, so unlike the reality of the war. Training officers were romantics. Spalko was a logical mind, and in real war, heroes didn't exist.

* * *

Relishing in the silence that allowed her to stew in her own self-pity, Spalko was in a rather foul mood when her Lieutenant entered the bunker. She had been quietly nursing her shoulder, using the pain of being shot as an excuse not to think about her real troubles.

As long as she was hurting physically, she could forget about her shifting relationship with Karov and the possible death of Natalya, whom she had grown unfortunately fond of in the short and traumatic time she had spent with the child.

"A candle," Karov acknowledged, his eyes drifting to the small flame the burned on the desk in front of her. "Pretending to write up the incident reports?"

"I handed them to commander Hedeon an hour ago. They were distracting me from my thoughts."

Karov chuckled and shook his head. "You should have let me write up the report. You've been shot."

"You should be changing your own bandages," Spalko drawled, burying her forehead in her hands and leaning her elbows on the desk.

"You didn't ask me if Natalya survived the skirmish," said Karov, removing his overcoat and shirt and unwrapping the gauze on his arm.

"I don't want to know," Spalko replied coldly. "I told you before; I have a very practical approach to warfare. I prefer not to inflict unnecessary emotions on myself." She lifted her head, her hand moving to her chest and clutching the loose, scratchy sweater that hung over her chest. Her gun was hanging with her overcoat, and her hands were anxious; they needed something to graspt at.

Karov stared at her through hard eyes, his jaw set with frustration. She knew he was upset at the distance she had placed between herself and the child, but she'd felt it was her first priority to be logical in the face of a chaotic situation.

"She's dead."

And, just like that, she broke. She'd been right, when she had told Karov there was something significant residing in a name. It was an identity; a unique trait that set one apart from the masses as an individual.

She heard the name 'Natalya,' and she could see the child's bright blue eyes and dirty hair, blinking suspiciously at her, ultimately offering her their trust. She could see the doll she dragged through the dirt and feel the small, scratchy hand clinging desperately to her own for a lifeline amidst the destruction. She could feel quick, fearful breaths on her neck as she carried the little girl to the jeeps and held her chin high at anyone who defied her choices. She could hear the first shots fire and feel the seconds of pure terror that convulsed within her as the jeep where Natalya had been sitting came under fire, before she surrendered herself to the moment and put all thoughts but survival out of her mind.

She saw Karov sitting behind her after the battle was over, as they fled back to camp, the trucks behind them managing damage control, as was customary for the rear end of caravans during the event of an ambush. She heard him tease her gently, before they knew that Natalia was dead, 'You looked like a hero from the old war stories.'

"I don't do this," she choked, running a hand down her face. "I keep myself from becoming attached so that I don't have to hurt. There are no heroes or guilty parties. Death is simply a fact; it can't reach out and claw at my throat, or fire a gun at my chest. All I am is a slave to biology. War exists becuse species have conflicts over resources. I am only a representation of that conflict, as is Natalya. If we are only slave to biology, why is my emotional detachment suddenly failing me?"

"Natalya was proof that we aren't just slaves to biology. Proof that the people we fought were the guilty party, and that we could be heroes."

Her voice was cracked, losing its proud, authoritative ring. "How?"

"How what?" Karov leaned on the desk as she fought with herself, fingernails digging into her throbbing forehead. All he could do was listen as she tore herself apart.

"How do you convince yourself that the romanticized perspective of war is still alive out there? How can you believe that there is justice in this; that there are good people out there shooting other good people for a reason other than biological conflicts? For three years I have managed to retain a sense of denial, if nothing else. But now- we're just killing each other. There are no war heroes who try to save the innocent. There are no brave men who sacrifice themselves for each other. Only machines. And I can't make myself indifferent to it any longer."

Karov bit his lip, considering how to respond to the question. She had seen the Petrov base. She had detached herself from everyone, and how that detachment was coming back to bite her in the ass. She was unaccustomed to emotion.

"I see things like you clawing at your eyes when you find you a little girl who you tried to save is dead. I see you have a nervous breakdown and know that if you were only following a biological impulse to survive, the guilt and grief wouldn't be eating you alive. That, Captain, reassures me that we are something more than the machines we're using to win this war."

Spalko got up from the desk, her lips sealed tightly, and stalked over to the radio. She flipped the button, and rough, scratchy swing music sounded in the bunker, mingling with the trail of smoke from candles and old cigarettes.

He looked up, startled. "Captain?" he asked, "Are you all right?"

"Peachy," Spalko mumbled darkly.

She could see the ghost of a smile slip up Karov's lips as the music drifted around the room, and she sat back down at her desk, content with observing him in his routine. She lit a cigarillo, hoping that would ease her mind, or at least settle her into some sort of sleep.

However, it simply caused her restlessness to increase, so she got to her feet again and stood over Karov as he bent the dog tags that gave him his identity back into their proper shape.

Without looking up, he asked, "Did you ever hear the story of the American who took two bullets and didn't even make a trip to the infirmary?" He paused for a moment, then continued, not waiting for her to acknowledge his voice. "He was wearing these stupid dog tags around his neck, along with a few metal trinkets he'd won in poker. An Italian soldier tried to put two bullets in his heart, but they just hit the dog tags."

Yes, she had heard this story. It had rippled around her training camp years back.

"Urban myth," she replied confidently.

"Just like the story about the soldier and the nurse who fell in love and died."

"What is it about severe injuries?" she breathed, closing her eyes as tightly as she could before sitting down beside him, unsure of how to cure the air of the electric current charged between them.

"They make us realize how precious life is."

Spalko grimaced. "I prefer not to indulge in such shameless romanticism, Lientenant Karov."

"They do, Captain. Near death experiences produce adrenaline and a heightened desire to live life fully."

"A lot of other emotions produce desire," she countered. "Adrenaline, pain, euphoria, satisfaction..." she trailed off, leaning into him and breathing in the scent of dust and dried blood from his face.

"You're human. It's impossible not to feel anything when a bullet barely misses your chest."

Neither had ever been one to feel the rough hungers that prolonged lack of intimacy left on soldiers. At this moment, it would have been useless to deny any form of attraction they felt toward each other, but was unwilling to think that she could be afflicted by the same physiological complexes her unit experienced, having seen precious little of the opposite sex aside from their terrifying captain, who was now locked in the passionate embraces of hypocrisy with her second-in-command.

Her mind was screaming at her to stop and think about what she was doing, and to please be reasonable. She tried her best to force down the wave of emotion she felt for Karov that she couldn't describe without using the word 'love,' which was an entirely unacceptable term to describe any relationship, especially one of their nature and in their situation.

"You don't believe in love, then?" It was a rhetorical question, mumbled almost incomprehensibly.

"Hell no," she said whole-heartedly, her voice breaking through the smell of a forgotten cigarillo and smoking, melting wax, and the god-awful melody of swing music on the radio. And their lips smashed together unceremoniously as she brushed her fingers against the bandages on his arm; a harsh reminder of where they were, despite the bout of ecstasy they were feeling.

"I believe in the resolution of sexual tension and heightened desire for a single subject," she said breathlessly, "but never love."

That night, the candle burnt out on its own.

**Well, a lot of inner turmoil, angst, and psychological damage. I think we'll go with something lighter next chapter. Or at least less depressing. A little more promising. Except you can probably all see where this is going, so I'll shut up now.**


	7. Chapter 7

**Well hi again, after all this time. This is gonna be a long, emotional chapter, so prepare yourself now :) Thanks so much to everyone who's been reading this, reviewing, following, favoriting, any of it! **

In the bunkers, time passed like ripples in water. No major battles, no mass fatalities, no news of the battles happening in France. Spalko could remember little of the weeks as they drifted by uneventfully; as winter approached, she would wake up shivering and, for a moment, forget exactly how old she was.

The only evolution she experienced was that of her surroundings. They advanced on Germany, taking control of the small Austrian town where her psychological barriers had crumbled and rebuilt themselves around Natalya. It was a slow trek towards victory, removed from the vastness of the war itself. Their radios were unreliable at best and completely useless at worst. All she could ever find was the same swing music over and over again that she could dance to in the bunker with Karov when the candles had gone out and the rest of the camp had slid into troubled sleep.

Of course, Spalko mused, that was something which had changed besides the life of the grass beneath her boot-covered feet. She had maintained a passionate affair with her second-in-command over the indefinite time that had passed, though she was still quite unsure as to how she felt about it in the environment they were in.

She struggled to justify the relationship in her head, without using the word 'love,' which she considered to be a concept not only unwelcome in war, but unwelcome in the world of survival itself. Every fiber in her body insisted that she should not attach herself to another human being. It was an illogical decision, and she could not think of a single way it would benefit her in the long run.

So why, she continued to wonder as she watched the smoke from her cigarette curl upwards into the winter air, did she still feel such a passionate attraction to Lieutenant Karov? Clearly he believed in far more shameless romanticism than she did, despite how intelligent she considered him to be. She was sure Karov believed that the distant and incomprehensible idea of 'love' actually existed, beyond a chemical reaction to ensure the survival of their species, despite the fact that such a chemical reaction was biologically inconvenient between such specimens as Karov and herself at such a perilous time in their lives.

If she were being entirely honest with herself, she knew that only two logical explanations existed for the intense desire she felt for her second-in-command: "love," as literature had romanticized it for centuries, or the sexual deprivation of spending so many years at war. The former was out of the question, and Spalko refused to believe that she was as susceptible to the latter affliction as the testosterone-driven boys that her country forced itself to call 'soldiers.'

Either she was an unlucky biological phenomenon, or she was in denial. She hated both.

She crumpled up the remains of her cigarette and stamped them into the thin coat of frost that lined the ground under her feet, then pulled her overcoat tighter over her uniform and strode into the bunker with her now filled-out report.

"Are you simply drawn to places that strain you physically?" Karov asked her as he took inventory of his basic possessions. They were about to move base camps, scouting the westward road for the main army so they did not encounter major trouble before they reached Germany.

Spalko snorted, feeling the weight of controversy lift from her chest slightly. "Not so much as I appreciate the value of the inhuman when I find myself too deep within human thoughts."

"Yes, there is some degree of poetic justice in watching the trees die as we slaughter each other across the continent." Ah, thought Spalko, there it was again: the soldiers' humor; those cynical witticisms that worked their way into the veins of them all no matter how idealistic they were when the fighting started.

"We will likely be departing before you can finish organizing your personal effects," she informed him briskly, running her fingers through her hair and feeling the ice crystals that had formed on her hairline.

"You look like you're blushing when you spend so much time in the cold," Karov said playfully, looking up from his mad organization of the belongings of the serviceman with a smirk.

"Now is not the time."

Karov looked sideways at her, nearly laughing at her blatant hypocrisy.

"You're right. Now is not the time. But neither was last night, nor yesterday, nor however long ago it was since the night Natalya died. It's never the time in a place like this, so we've got nothing more to lose now than we ever had."

Spalko knew he had made an extremely logical argument in pointing that out but, if she were being honest, she had felt outside-of-herself all day, as if some outside force was occupying her body and fighting her for control.

Until she had met Karov, her thoughts had been perfectly filed and organized and all her questions had been answered.

Now, she had begun to ponder the concepts of morality, justice, and all the intangible, human-created matters she had pushed away for years. The disorder her mind nearly removed her from her body, for such chaos was not a trait attributed to her. It wasn't her. The world had become slightly skewed through her eyes, and the crookedness of it was spinning her head and turning her stomach.

"It is never the time," repeated Karov, his voice slightly bitter.

She sighed, conceding, and captured his lips in her own. They basked in the bliss of a stolen moment until she grumbled quietly, "We should be going."

They hoisted their packs over their shoulders and left the bunker, unsurprised to find that they were among the last people to reach the caravan. Spalko climbed behind the wheel of the leading truck, thankful she didn't have to take rear foot guard this time. She revved the engines loudly, and the few soldiers who hadn't yet left their bunkers raced out with their packs and got into the trucks as quickly as they could.

She slid over into the passenger seat as another officer took his shift to drive. She had to be at the window, pistol at ready, in case they encountered trouble. That was, of course, what the lookouts were for, but Spalko knew better than to take chances on a couple of half-awake, low-ranking officers.

As their trucks rumbled down the thin dirt roads, Spalko tried as best she could to refuse her mind the right to wander every which way. She found it difficult to concentrate, as if something about the world was slightly crooked, yet she couldn't discern what it was. It was an unsettling feeling that refused to leave her. The cars shook, and her stomach roiled again from discomfort. She gulped down the bile in her throat, shaking her head and rubbing her temples. She hadn't slept particularly well the previous night; clearly the tension surrounding her was even affecting her behavior.

Spalko wrinkled her nose. Something had happened to her when she met Natalya in the rubble of a bombed town. Compassion was not wired into her instincts. It was against everything she had schooled herself to become to succeed as a military officer. So why, she wondered distractedly, had she tossed her survival instincts aside for a little girl left in the dust?

Her stomach lurched again, and she clutched the windowsill, scratching the rough grey paint that covered the vehicle.

"Ugh," she grumbled, reminding herself to tell the soldiers when they arrived at their destination that the water was probably tainted. She drummed her fingers impatiently on the window, closing her eyes and leaning back in her seat.

It was unfamiliar to her, the feeling of physical weakness and misery, and she'd nearly forgotten how painful it was. She loathed how incapable she felt at the moment; she knew if there was an ambush her chances of survival would diminish exponentially if she remained in this state, yet no amount of mental control could stifle the feeling.

She directed her train of thought back to the scenery around her in an attempt to ignore her sickness. Every tree they passed was bare and shivering, the ground coated with frost.

Spalko was a stone statue, still and unchanging in a constantly changing world. All the soldiers were, she supposed. They didn't really change until they went back home and realized what war had done to them.

How long had it been since she surrendered to her emotions and desires? How long had it been since that bitter mid-autumn day? The day Natalya died, the only significant moment she could recall in a sea of corpses with no recognizable faces worth mourning? How long since she had begun to pass her nights blissfully in the embrace of Lieutenant Karov?

The trucks passed through an old stone tunnel, and for a mere second that felt like hours to Spalko, she was thrown into darkness. However, when the tunnel ended, and the daylight streamed into her eyes again, it was as if a light flickered on in her head. In that moment, every thought, bred in denial in the back of her mind that she had shoved away with all the fears she had ever suppressed came flooding back to her.

She rode the rest of the way in a strained, ponderous silence.

* * *

Karov was relieved when the caravan of soldiers and firearms reached its next base camp. It was an abandoned Russian outpost from the earliest years of the war, that glittered through a light snowfall in all its haunting glory. Battles had torn up the ground, and old trinkets and tokens were strewn about the camp at random.

Karov jumped down from the back of the truck with two low-ranking officers from the offensive team Spalko's unit shared their base camps with. He scanned his eyes for his lover and commanding officer, but couldn't find her in the sudden commotion. He approached the other unit's commanding officer with a sharp salute and over the noise of the machine guns being unpacked and moved asked him, "Where are the commanders' bunkers?"

The captain jerked his chin toward a smallest bunker in the back that Karov assumed he would be sharing with Spalko.

He figured they had gotten lucky in that respect, so to speak, but no one was lucky enough to get a bunker to themselves, and he wasn't quite sure they wanted to. It was reassuring to have another living, breathing body within earshot at night, when the only sounds he could hear were shells falling in distant battles and the drone of airplanes overhead.

It was even more reassuring, he thought to himself with a slight grin, if he was madly in love with the woman he shared his bunker with. He slipped inside the bunker and dropped his pack, then tested the electricity. He flicked the lights on, and jumped half a foot.

Spalko cocked her eyebrow, sitting motionless on the corner bunk, where it was so dark without the light that he hadn't noticed her presence there before.

"Wow," he muttered, clutching his chest. "You scared me."

She grimaced and leaned back against the wall, closing her eyes. "That was not necessarily my intention. Should I be proud, though?"

Karov could sense her discomfort immediately. He had come to understand that Spalko was a creature of habit more than anything else, and it was easy to tell when something was off in her head. Her dark hair, always kept neat and tucked in the collar of her uniform, hung loosely at her sides, just past her shoulders, and her face held the dullness of a sick animal awaiting natural death.

"Did you drink the water from the last base camp?" she asked him without opening her eyes.

He could clearly see her head was throbbing just by the way her fingers drifted toward her temples subconsciously. "Yes…" Karov trailed off awkwardly. "Why do you ask?" He ran his own fingers through his hair and sat down next to her as she dragged her other hand over her forehead and groaned quietly. He did his best to hide his alarm as he answered her trail of random questions. He had never seen his captain in such a state; it humanized her nearly as much as seeing her with Natalya had done. It was almost terrifying, because Karov knew that nothing short of Natalya's death had left her close to fainting, gripping at her head as if it were about to explode.

When she spoke next, her voice was weak. "It was bad water." It sounded more like an insistence to herself than a warning to him.

"Well," said Karov with a shrug, "If it had affected me, I think I would be feeling it by now. I'm probably safe."

"Could you check on the rest of the unit? See if they've gotten sick from the water? I would prefer to know before tomorrow when we scout the town and they put themselves behind a machine gun."

Wordlessly, Karov complied with the order, and he was frightened to find that Spalko's eyes – which had followed each person like hawk's since she had been assigned to command – did not even open to see if he had left.

He approached the neighboring bunker that held five or six of Spalko's unit; it was twice the size of the command bunker, but as he stepped in, the air felt far more stuffy. The six men were playing poker and betting cigarettes – all that was worth betting after months on the move.

"At ease," he called as he entered the bunker, and they looked up from their game. "Your captain would like to know now if any of you have experienced the effects of bad water since we moved camps."

They shook their heads in unison, too focused on the cards to fully answer his inquiries. Karov felt his frustration boil up, but he didn't push the matter, because clearly none of them were suffering from water-borne sickness.

Snorting dismissively, Karov left the soldiers to their card game.

He approached more bunkers, asking the same question, but it was clear no one in the unit had experienced the effects of poisoned water. Finally, he returned to speak to Spalko, only to find the command bunker empty, a lit cigarillo resting on the bunk itself. He grabbed the cigarillo and crumpled it under his foot, just in case it caught the whole bunker on fire.

Why, he wondered to himself, would Spalko leave her cigarette on the bed? It was as if she had simply disappeared. He could feel his concern mounting; in all the time he had known her (and he had gotten to know her quite well), she had chosen not to show weakness in front of others, not even in front of him, despite the fact that he could always feel her discomfort. They shared a gift, he supposed, of reading the emotions of others and picking up on small details. She was hyper-observant; he was highly empathetic. In an odd way, he supposed, that was what drew them to each other.

Outwardly, Karov was as calm as he had always been in tense situations. Inwardly, he worried she had spotted a German scout of some kind and decided to take care of it herself. However, her gun was still in the bunker. She had left without it.

Grabbing his own gun just in case, Karov strolled as nonchalantly as he could beyond the borders of the base camp, into a thick patch of woods left bare by the coming winter. A set of footprints wound between the trees, and he tracked every step through the frost-covered grass. By now, he was just as curious as he was concerned for Spalko.

It was the sound of retching that eventually brought him to find his once stoic commander in a state of upheaval. It was a shock to him, her sudden inability to ignore any pain she felt when all of her self-control wanted her to walk away and deny these moments of vulnerability ever happened.

Karov was no disgusted, mesmerized child, but rather a hardened soldier. He had seen people toss up their meals and empty the contents of their stomach onto the ground; they all broke down from the unpleasantness of it, even wept. Spalko, on the other hand, seemed to express more rage than grief. She stood up from where she had been kneeling, tied back her hair as tightly as she could, and kicked the tree closest to her, beating her fists against the trunk. Having exhausted herself entirely, she leaned her back on the small tree, her face dry. She did not weep, but gritted her teeth, dragging her fingernails along the bark, driving her heel into the ground like an agitated horse. Every compassionate instinct within him wanted him to approach her and wrap his arms around her, but his proud commander, he was sure, would rather spend her most vulnerable moments in private, without an audience.

He jumped in surprise as she shouted, without warning, her head still resting on the freezing tree, "What did I do to you! What the hell did I ever do to you? In all the time I've been trapped on this godforsaken planet, what did I do to deserve this? Well? Tell me!"

Karov took a step back in surprise, scared for a minute that she was talking to him, but her eyes were turned to the sky. Spalko did not believe in a deity, but she certainly believed in forces outside her control.

Spalko pulled her nails away from the winter-hardened bark of the tree, gripped the front of her overcoat and mumbled under her breath, "I'm sorry. God, I'm so sorry," over and over again like the scratchy swing melodies they danced to on the radio, still too proud to cry, but he could tell as she hunched weakly against the tree that she was close to heaving up another meal, even through her blind mask of ire and misery.

He had heard enough. His curiosity was overwhelming him, and his compassion was driving him to act. There was little debate left in his mind over what to do now. So he took a step toward her, his boots crunching on the frosted ground.

At once, Spalko whipped her head around to face him and froze as she looked him in the eye, written across her face such a great degree of tension and terror he wondered if someone out of sight was holding a gun to her head.

"Captain?" Karov said, as softly as he could manage. The thought crossed his mind, briefly, that she would knock him unconscious. But Spalko simply heaved a sigh and pursed her lips, a sign of defeat that he never thought he would witness.

Her voice trembled as she spoke, choking down another wave of illness. "Damian."

And that was when he knew this was a matter of life and death. He had known something was terribly wrong, of course, but he didn't believe it concerned him. He believed, honestly, that she was experiencing the miserable effects of severe water poisoning. Yet she never called him by his first name. It had always been 'Lieutenant,' or 'Karov' or 'Lieutenant Karov.' She had never addressed him so personally before.

In a split second decision, he returned the gesture.

"Irina."

Her eyes flashed, then wore down to a sickly blue-grey, as they had been earlier in the bunker, but now her face had grown even more pale, almost gaunt in the dimming light of evening. She opened her mouth again, gulping, and schooled her features to appear as authoritative as she could in her current state.

"Damian Karov, you will not speak until I permit you, do you understand?" She attempted a stern tone, rough through the sickness present in her speech, but it was clear to him anyway that as his commander, she was giving him an order. He noticed that she was visibly shaking; not trembling, but shaking, out of sickness and pain and all the anger that had ever built up inside of her spilling over. Her fingers shook as she grasped at her uniform.

"Understood."

"You are going to want to protect me, and to keep me safe and out of harm's way. You are going to want to assume field command of my unit to prevent me from getting shot. You are going to want to keep me safe, but I am going to die, and you are going to die, and nothing you can do will prevent that. You cannot grow more attached." Her breaths had grown tense and uneven, her eyes suddenly wilding, as if she had become fiercely protective of her words themselves.

Karov gaped, nearly scoffed, at such an order, even going so far as to break his agreement to silence. "You know as well as I do that I can't promise – "

"I'm pregnant."

**Please state in reviews how many of you saw that coming halfway through the chapter. Because I was trying to be relatively subtle. Or at least subtle enough that it doesn't detract from the reflection throughout the chapter. And to anyone who's reading this and has also read _Matchmaker, Matchmaker, _Spalko's storyline in that was indeed a parody of this chapter (sort of) before this chapter was actually written. It was a satire of a chapter I have yet to actually write. Make potato chips, not air!**


	8. Chapter 8

**Well, here we go with the next chapter. No real battles in this one, but a great deal of emotional stress. I feel so bad for these characters, except that I'm the one who's giving them grief. So maybe it's just guilt. Why am I doing this to my favorite antagonist? We torture the characters we love. It's a part of the fan fiction oath. Anyways, on with the chapter.**

**Thanks as always to my beta reader, for the lovely advice :)**

It seemed the air was heavy with a thick, unbearable silence, like the stuffy breaths taken before being gassed out of a trench.

Karov said nothing, sitting beside her in the bunker. There had been a wordless agreement between them as they had returned not to speak of the matter, but she had felt Karov's eyes fixed on her abdomen, blatantly staring.

Of course, Spalko was in no place to be cautiously optimistic. She balled her hands into fits to keep them from drifting pitifully to her stomach out of sheer curiosity of what she might feel. But feeling, she decided, was to remain absent as long as possible, for it was inevitable that her pregnancy would end in disaster.

"You are aware," she croaked, her throat still stinging from vomit, "that I have no chance of carrying this child to term."

She could clearly see the way his gaze snapped upwards, back to her face, betraying his bitter fascination. She glared at him though dark-circled eyes.

"You are free to speak, Lieutenant," she said, her voice hardened. The formality was reassuring; if nothing else, their military partnership would remaing the same. She honestly hoped that he would pretend she had never told him about the baby and go on to treat her just as he had over the past months. It was only her wavering moral compass that had compelled her tell him the truth at all, for she knew Karov well enough to be sure his shameless romanticism wouldn't allow him to go on as if nothing had happened.

"I don't know if I can," he said. "Ignore this, I mean. And I don't believe you can either." Karov took a shuddering breath, his lover's face turned away from him still, although he could tell in the way her eyes focused on the small desk in front of them that she was listening.

"Do we have a choice?" she asked, still refusing to look him in the eye.

"I thought we agreed that everything that every happens to us is based on a choice."

Spalko's gaze shifted from the desk to the ground, flitting everywhere but Karov and her stomach, which she deliberately avoided. "Sometimes, though, there are clear choices. Choices we have to make for the sake of survival."

"And sometimes the lines are blurred," said Karov, the flatness of his tone forced. Spalko could feel her headached grow worse. There was a sense of chaos swimming in her head that pounded against her skull. She was trapped in a situation that she had no control over. "Sometimes the choice one makes to survive is not the choice you would make to live."

With a shuddering breath, Spalko got up. "I cannot discuss this. By all means, continue speaking. But expect no words in response. I'm going to bed." She shrugged off her overcoat, tugging her shoulder-length hair out of its tight bun, and dropped her boots by the door of the bunker. She pulled the uniform over her head, followed by its under-layer, in complete silence.

Karov's breath hitched, not with arousal, but with sentiment. She stood facing the wall, her eyes straight ahead so all he could make out of her face was the silhouette of her sharp features. But bare-skinned from the waist up in the dim evening light, shivering slightly from the cold, she was visibly pregnant. Barely so, but the nearly indiscernible curve of her belly stood out from the side. For a moment, he felt the urge to reach forward; to run his hand over the tightening skin with overwhelming fondness. Then he shook himself, blinking a few times.

"Ever the romantic," he heard Spalko mutter, and he looked up to catch her eye for the first time since she had hunched over the tree and announced to him so bitterly and unceremoniously that she pregnant with his child.

He didn't know what compelled him to even ask. "May I-" His hand twitched slightly.

"No," Spalko growled coldly, although her own hand drifted upwards, fingering her lower abdomen. He suspected it was a sub-conscious reaction, or else a protective gesture.

"You do realize that you are-"

She jerked her hand away from her stomach and balled her fists at her sides, before grabbing the thick, loose sweater she always slept in and throwing it over her head, covering the soft swell with woolen fabric.

"Any physical contact with this unborn child, and our… situation will become obvious to our other commanding officers before someone even has a chance to kill us." Spalko's eyebrows drew together furiously, but he doubted she was speaking to him so much as she was to herself.

He took ahold of her hand, pulling back down to the cot, and kissed her. He kept his hands wrapped around her neck, but he could feel the slight curve of her stomach pressed against his chest as she leaned into him, and thought that maybe, for now, that was enough. He wanted so inexplicably, but so badly, to feel with his hands the odd little creation of theirs living and growing inside her. He knew, though, that Spalko was right.

He allowed her to break the kiss and climb into her bunk. He could hear her shift onto her side, exhausted from the events which had transpired throughout the day.

Spalko lay awake in her bunk, her limbs aching, her stomach still lurching, but her mind unwilling to give in to sleep just yet. Her hand spread over the curve of her belly, the terrifying thought taking hold of her that there really was a _life _growing there. A life, just like herself, and Karov, and Natalya. She mused on the fact that inevitably that life would end in combat before it could even truly begin.

A surge of hope rose within her, that maybe if the war ended, she and Karov could leave together. She could go back to Moscow and become a master of science. She could study anthropology and come to understand all the nagging inconsistencies within the human race that she had already pinpointed on instinct.

Perhaps she could come to better understand those forces which dictated her passionate sentiments toward Lieutenant Karov, and the sentiments he returned with equal passion. It was a biological paradox; it was against the human survival instinct. And love, as literature defined it, had no grounds in the world of science and logic. It defied logic.

She wondered sometimes if the defiance of logic was why Karov had become so fixated with love. If their attraction toward each other could exist despite its improbability, then maybe against all odds, they would survive the war.

Indeed, that was what their unborn child undoubtedly represented to Karov: hope. Hope, she had too often felt, was a liability. The lower her expectations, the more easily they would be met. She never experienced the pang of loss when one of her men went down, because death was not a tragedy if it was a commonplace fact. It would be wrong to say she had grown numb to it; she had always been numb to it. She'd come to expect the worst of any situation, and if the end result was better than her painfully low expectation, then she was pleased with it.

She still remembered, even after months, the faint hope on Karov's face and the pang of it coursing through her. Natalia had been a beacon of hope, and the world had let them down. She had seen the twinkle in his eye the minute she had shed her uniform and the swell of her stomach was painstakingly bare, clear to the eye of anyone who knew her as well as Damian Karov.

She almost felt guilty at the uncertainty she had caused him. She'd had acquaintances in the past, who had settled down and raised children. They had always become so domestic, so complacent with their lives, grinning like fools at the baby bumps they bore.

Spalko snorted. She was no domestic fool, nor did she think she could ever be complacent after everything she witnessed on the front. She didn't want to be complacent, or domestic. A distant part of her wanted to be an epic; the great survival story, the great war story told to later generations. Wanted to be an odyssey, never forgotten in time. An even more distant part of her wanted to be a story of martyrdom, to inspire even in death. That was the part of her she wasn't proud of, which she stored away.

She knew, though, that she never wanted to be domestic. She never wanted to be conventional. She was an anomaly, not of nature but of the laws human society had defined in _spite _of nature. She was proud of it, too proud, perhaps. She was too proud to submit to the soppy convention of speaking aloud to her unborn child, or giving Karov the satisfaction of holding his hand to her stomach and feeling whatever wonder was supposed to come naturally.

Those were the things families did when they were not about to die. Who were going to see their child into the world healthy and strong, and who did not wake up every morning to the knowledge that they probably wouldn't return that night, and if they did would be so relieved that they exchanged only heated kisses. There was no room for futures and expectations. They were living each second as it happened, and Spalko both cherished and hated the lack of organization which had taken hold of her life.

It started with Karov, split open with Natalya, and ended with her fingers clenched in some form of cold terror, arms crossed over her chest as if she were lying in a coffin. Or maybe it ended with Karov as well. It ended with his pain as Spalko began to shut him out, to prevent their grief from consuming them when their child inevitably died, just like Natalya.

Then she realized: she owed it to him. She owed that hope to him, because she had refused to acknowledge it the first time, while Natalya was still alive. She owed him the small, soppy moments that bound to end in tragedy. Yes, tragedy. Not simply fact this time. It was unavoidable; she could clearly see it now. She would try her best not to grow attached, just as she had done when she met Karov, but whether or nor she succeeded, she would still feel the pain of loss, for it was already so intertwined in her life; a physical part of her.

Yes. She owed Karov that. Her eyes felt heavy at the realization, and she rolled onto her back, drifting into uncomfortable sleep.

Spalko woke that morning, her head pounding as it had in the truck when they transferred base camps. She groaned quietly and climbed out of the bunk, putting her overcoat on over her sweater and stepping into her boots. It was early; she could smell the cold mist still settled over their camp. She moved quietly about the bunker, as Karov was still sleeping. It had become a habit of hers, as autumn had progressed, to wake early and sit outside the bunker, watching the sun come up and the camp come to life, a cigarette between her fingers.

She leaned over the table for the rationed packet of cigarillos, and her overcoat brushed over the bump of her lower abdomen. She froze instinctually at the unfamiliar sensation, her hand going to the empty holster at her side, where she would usually have her gun. She realized after only a moment that it was only her coat, not the barrel of a rifle or a small piece of shrapnel from far off explosions.

At least, Spalko thought bitterly, her reflexes were still top notch. They were the reflexes every soldier had; some people called it post traumatic stress disorder, but she called it small scale evolution. Soldiers adapted to the dangers of their surroundings, and heightened alert was simply one of them.

She grabbed the cigarettes and her pistol from the desk, sliding the gun into its holster, and stepped out of the bunker. Settling down against the wall, she lit the cigarette, thankful for the relief it provided from her tensions.

In one breath, the cigarillo's smoke made her stomach roil, and she dropped it in the frosty grass, coughing and gulping down a wave of vomit.

"Ugh," she grumbled to herself, stomping it into the grass with the toe of her boot. "Of all the things to turn your stomach, it has to be this." She grabbed another out of the packet, this time not bothering to light it, just gnawing on the end for its familiarity. Now even the whiff of smoke and ash in her nostrils was no longer to be a constant presence.

She didn't know how long she spent, seated against the bunker wall, watching her team wake up and prepare for the day. Day after day, she had listened to them talk about their lives back home: their friends, their families… the older ones were married with children; the younger spoke of their aging parents. They said their families wanted to make a difference in the war. She wondered, sometimes, why they spoke about influencing the war but never tried. If they had the desire to act, why did they not act?

As the sun rose higher, Spalko got to her feet, her headache receding. She hadn't eaten since the previous day, and she knew she probably should, but her stomach still turned. She stepped back into the bunker, still gnawing her unlit cigarette. Karov was awake, buttoning his overcoat and tidying his bunk.

"Hello, Captain," he said stiffly, forcing his face into a neutral expression. Spalko knew he was angry with her, but a fair amount of grief still read in the furrow of his brow.

"Good morning, Damian," she replied, hoping the fond use of his first name would cut the tension in the air. He only jerked his chin in acknowledgement.

Spalko looked down at her sweater, realizing it was probably best she should change into her uniform. She took off her sweater and reached for the uniform she had hung over a metal support bar. When she looked back, Karov had frozen on the bunk. There it was again, the fear and wonder in his eyes as the bump of her belly was visible again.

"Not—" She opened her mouth to say something cutting, but the words choked in her throat. "I'm sorry." It was what she'd said in the woods, hunched against a dying tree, but she still wasn't sure who she was apologizing to.

"Don't be," said Karov, tearing his eyes from her midsection. It didn't even cross her mind to cover it with her uniform as she spoke. All the complications of their life needed to be out in the open. "You do what is necessary."

"You see the line between the necessary decisions and the right ones."

"Is there a right decision?" Karov asked her. Spalko sat down beside him, her uniform still hanging from her fist.

"Probably not." Her fingers drummed against the surface of the bunk, exactly where they had sat in silence the evening before. As she looked at the pain in his eyes as he accepted her decision to distance herself from the child they had conceived, the guilt became overwhelming. Her face softened noticeably.

Spalko could see the glimmer of hope in his eyes return as she looked directly at him. Her own changes in emotion were as obvious to Karov as his were to her. His empathy rivaled her skills in observation and analysis.

He held out his hand one last time. "May I?" It was not so much as a plead as an inquiry that translated as, "Have you given up on withholding all emotion?"

Her lips tightened, and she nodded. Damian's hand was callused and cold against her stomach, and she found herself fighting back a sense of fondness. She pressed her lips together tighter still, her breaths shaking. Karov lifted his hand and took ahold of her wrist, guiding her own hand back to the bump.

"What are you doing?" she demanded, her breathing growing more rapid.

"Forcing you to acknowledge the truth. I'm sure you have analyzed every detail of your life, but I'm also quite sure that you have refused to acknowledge that there is a human being there." He gestured to her abdomen. "And that this human being is tied to our lives."

"I have acknowledged that," Spalko muttered stubbornly.

"Not the attachment that comes with it." He was right. She had felt that frightening welling of love trying to crawl up her throat. She wouldn't let it. She wouldn't.

"Yes, you will," said Karov.

"I said that out loud."

"Yes, you did."

"Fine," said Spalko, jerking her hand away. "I admit it. Now we have to go." She threw her uniform over her head, covering the slight baby bump.

Karov's brow furrowed. "You're going to go out there and get shot at."

"Yes. Yes, I am, but this is one of those instances where we do _not _have a choice." Her voice was just barely trembling, but Karov noticed.

He said nothing.

**Well, hope you liked. There were only so many cliches I could possibly avoid. Remember, the campaign for potato chips rather than bags of air is still open :) Also if you have particularly strong feelings about what their child could possibly be named, please do tell. It's still up for debate, and I currently have no ideas myself, and only so many chapters of procrastination until I have to think of something.**


	9. Chapter 9

**So I had a dream the other night that Spalko and Karov were cannibalistic goldfish that got their heads chopped off, and I decided it was time to write another chapter to ease my mind. I needed to remember that they were characters, not fish hell bent on eating each other. Here you go... *awkward silence***

**Thanks as always to my wonderful beta reader, and everyone who reviews this story.**

Probability, Spalko had come to realize, was a fickle thing. Battle after battle, she expected to collapse, to feel the fragile life inside of her crumble. She expected to take a bullet, to toss away her last breaths into chilly air and gunfire smoke, utter something significant in her last words to be romanticized for generations to come.

Each time she engaged in combat, she systematically weighed the odds that she would die, and the longer she spent at war, the lower her odds of survival became. She didn't know how many weeks had gone by since she had hunched against a dying tree and told Karov that she was with child. That had been late autumn, as the last leaves fell. It had to have been at least a month.

So why, she wondered as they drove the caravan toward a prospective outpost nearly half-way through Austria, was she still alive? And how had she managed to carry her unborn child through a war zone?

"I do not know whether to love or loathe scientific anomalies," she murmured to herself, gnawing on the end of an unlit cigarette as she leaned on the door of the small army car. In the other seat, Karov snorted.

"How long have you been asking yourself that question?"

"I could ignore it quite well. But now… it has gotten more difficult." She massaged her temples.

"Are we still discussing scientific anomalies, or something else?" She could feel his eyes drift downward from her face to her stomach.

"Not entirely sure," she replied, her voice barely audible. She shivered slightly, the wind stinging her face. The weather seemed like December; the cold was nearly unbearable. They would all have frozen by now had they not grown accustomed to winters in the Soviet Union. She had become consistently greatful for her overcoat; not only because it warmed her, but because it had eventually become the only thing that could hide her pregnancy from her soldiers.

She sighed into the unlit cigarette, watching tiny shreds of its paper fly out behind her and vanish in the morning air. Listening to American radios when she could not get ahold of Soviet stations brought on Yuletide music and nostalgia. She had learned the English language during her adolescence, in preparation for the war, figuring it would be a handy skill to have as long as they were in a tense alliance with the British and the Americans.

Ahead of them, gunshots rang out, and the fore-guard car spun, its wheel punctured by a bullet. Karov kicked his heel against the breaks, skidding along the icy road. Several German soldiers were concealed in the brush ahead, firing at the caravan.

Spalko clambered out of the car, loading her automatic rifle and crouching down beside the fore-guard. She could just barely make out movement in the thick forest of dead trees spread out on either side of the road before them. She fired at first glimpse of a head and shoulders, only enough of her enemies visible to take aim at.

A bullet whizzed past her, just barely missing her head, and her stomach coiled. It had been relatively easy to ignore her pregnancy in the midst of battle, since it had not yet begun to impair her physically. She could force the thought from her mind and remain focused on the tasks at hand. Yet there had come a point where the moment she removed her overcoat, she was very obviously with child.

Even now, she could feel the soft swell beneath her uniform, the cold butt of her rifle pressing against it as a constant reminder of the stakes at hand. It was the first time she had felt such a welling of protectiveness under open fire, and it took her by surprise.

With a deep breath, Spalko tried to redirect her thoughts toward the offensive, creeping forward with her men. She caught a quick glimpse of Karov, his eyes begging the question, "What the hell are you doing?" as she inched toward the Germans.

Spalko glared at him over the front line. _I am acting as a commanding officer is expected to act. _She slipped between two of her soldiers and gestured for them to follow. She was a captain in the army; she might as well act like one.

Her stomach clenched, and an instinct welled up inside of her to leap back into the truck, but she fought it. She was a commander; she could not slip behind the lines in cowardice. Yet each time a bullet whizzed past her, her hand flew once more to the bump of her stomach, clutching the folds of her overcoat as if it would protect her unborn child from the danger surrounding her.

She narrowed her eyes, catching another flash of motion in the trees, and aiming her automatic. She motioned her men forward in a V-formation, keeping low to the ground and picking off their opponents one by one. Another bullet flashed inches past her head, whizzing by the tip of her ear. She gritted her teeth, halting in the road. The shots had ceased, and with the slightest motion of her hand, her team open fired on the tree line as she slipped back into the formation and out of the line of fire.

Karov was on one knee on the hood of their truck, aiming at the German ranks. Spalko herself propped her gun atop the car to keep it stable, bringing it as far from her stomach as possible without arousing suspicion from her men. She could almost view the gun as poison to the baby she carried, tainting the innocence of new life with the burdens of war.

As the spray of gunshots tossed up the ground, Spalko shouted to Karov, "We ought to retreat! I do not want our unit to become prisoners of war!" It was clear they were outnumbered nearly two to one. Several of her men had gone down already, and she could see that the Germans' line of fire was far thicker than their own.

Karov nodded in response, his eyes flicking between her face and his automatic. There was little time to think over their decision. Spalko fired rapidly into the enemy ranks hidden in the trees, until she was nearly out of bullets. Slipping her gun over her shoulder, she whistled to the remaining men in the unit. They had begun with twenty-two men in the formation, the other ten securing cargo in the trucks. They were a small unit, but their purpose was infiltration, not open front warfare. Now, there were only fifteen men in formation, and they reacted immediately to her call and raced back to the trucks. She noted, in her peripheral vision, that the young face of Private Arman lay bloodied in the dirt, another casualty of the war.

Shaking herself, she barked orders to the company, directing them to the closest trucks and clearing them from the area as quickly as possible. The Germans were still firing on them; the unit had to move before they lost anymore men. She had no time to ponder life and death at the moment.

Karov slid into the driving seat, their former front guard secured in trucks behind them. There was no use for a front guard as they were cutting their losses, making a retreat now before they were captured.

Before Karov could turn the truck around as the others were doing, a bullet hit the windshield, inches from Spalko's forehead. She cursed loudly, hissing under her breath, as the glass shattered, and its fragments flew in every direction. She could feel the pieces of glass embed themselves in her face, cutting her cheeks and her nose, even her forehead. In her peripheral vision, the cut beside her eye was beginning to bleed, and she was quite sure the others had as well.

"Drive!" she snapped at Karov, her breath hitched, the pain almost unbearable. Luckily, none of the glass pieces had been buried too deeply in her skin, and had missed her eyes. The blood loss would not be fatal, but it hurt like _hell, _and she would eventually lose consciousness if she could not get her hands on a gauze. He only had to glance briefly at her face before he spun the small truck around as quickly as he could, away from the constant fire of the German troop.

"Shit," Spalko muttered, touching the cut on her forehead and feeling the sticky sensation of fresh blood. "Drive faster!"

"We can only follow them!" Karov shouted back, gesturing through their broken windshield at the other trucks in front of them. "Just hold out until we get to base camp. We don't have a choice." Spalko could see Karov had taken some of the blow as well, though most of the glass had missed him; his cheek had a harsh line slicing through it, and his lip was cut and swollen.

It only then occurred to her that probability might have finally caught up to her. She would not die from such a wound as this, but the baby—her hand drifted back to her abdomen, her thumb rubbing soft circles on the rough fabric of her overcoat.

"I'm sorry," she whispered again, because it was all she could think to say. She thought back to the battle, the overwhelming urge to protect the child within her. Some deep love had welled up in her heart and spilled over. She felt it still, the fierce, protective love for such a tiny, fragile life so close to such death and destruction.

_I will not be domestic, _she thought to herself, and she knew it to be true. She could not be domestic, but she could not deny the love she felt for her child already. It clawed at her, burning in her chest, stewing with all the guilt and remorse she had kept buried for so long.

It was terrifying.

Spalko looked up at the greying sky. A horrid slush had begun to fall, neither rain nor snow, the awful type of sleet that seeped through uniforms and had left her shivering many a night on the Petrov base. She shrugged deeper into her oversized uniform, her frame seeming to shrink before Karov's eyes. She seemed so small, huddled in her overcoat in the van, her hair falling into her face as sleet soaked into it. It was a sharp contrast from how she usually stood, tall and straight-backed before her soldiers. She had always been such a huge presence then, giving orders and leading drills. Now, she appeared no less gaunt-faced and broken than the rest of them, although perhaps a bit better at channeling her emotions into her work.

Karov could not help but chuckle silently to himself as he examined her face through the slush. She still retained the proud furrow of her brow and the set of her jaw, locked in an expression of stubbornness. Even as her wounds from the glass bled messily on her face, she was proud and beautiful, as she had always been.

Finally, Spalko turned his way, clenching her jaw to keep it from chattering. "What are you looking at?" she snapped, but there was no fire in her voice. Her hand, he noticed, was still rested over the bump of her belly. She would not be able to hide it for a great deal longer, even with her oversized coat. Eventually she would have to take leave, and Karov expected that he would try to take leave as well.

That, of course, was highly optimistic, considering their current situation. If she lost enough blood, she would most likely lose the baby. Karov could feel his nerves jump fearfully at the thought. He had become more aware perhaps even than Spalko of the unborn baby. He had watched her gnaw resentfully for weeks at unlit cigarettes, but he had seen her at night, gingerly fingering the stretched skin in grim fascination and reverence and even love, daresay.

She had become just as invested, despite her better interests, as he had. Love, had become inevitable as death.

"Irina," he said, watching her stare bleakly out the frozen windshield, concealing the pain of her injuries.

"Damian," she acknowledged without even looking at him.

Keeping his eyes on the road ahead, Karov took his right hand from the steering wheel and reached out for her midsection until his fingers found the soft swell of her abdomen. Spalko pressed her lips together, her eyes narrowed, but said nothing, reaching up to wipe blood from her chin and her jaw and watching it mix with the wet slush in her hand.

"I love you," said Karov, squinting through the slush at the road in front of them. There was no deep breath, no grandiose build-up to it. The words slipped naturally from his tongue, without the embellishment of a great declaration.

"I love you," Spalko repeated, her eyes drifting down to his hand, still pressed against her rounding belly. Her voice stuttered slightly from the cold, and she shook the blood and freezing water from her hands and laid them atop Karov's. "I'm sorry."

They drove back in complete silence.

* * *

The base camp was fading to quiet as the caravan returned, a bonfire crackling. They did not have to worry about a German invasion; this was territory they had already laid claim to. Spalko climbed out of the car with a lack of her usual grace, her vision impaired by the blood from her forehead that had trailed down into her eyes in the slush.

She marched as purposefully as she could to the first aid bunker, aiming to snatch a roll of gauze, or anything they had to stop the bleeding. She pushed through the tent flaps, her stomach roiling at the sight of so many mortally wounded soldiers. The vast majority of them had arrived wounded at this camp, and were only dying of infection because they had not received treatment on the front.

"Gauze?" she requested of the resident doctor.

The doctor did at double take at the sight of her face, shards of glass embedded everywhere he could see.

"Find a cot, Captain," he said. "Sit down, and allow me to remove the glass from your injuries."

Spalko shook her head. "With all due respect, Doctor, I can do that myself. I just need gauze, and I'm sure you have more serious injuries to attend to."

"I'm sorry, Captain Spalko, but I will have to request that you sit down so I can take a look at the wounds."

Jutting out her chin, Spalko sat down on a small, unoccupied cot as the doctor examined the glass in her face.

"And I recall that you took a bullet to the shoulder as well, a few months ago?"

"Indeed. But that has long since healed."

"Allow me to check to make sure no infection has formed."

Spalko rolled her eyes, holding up her arm just to demonstrate that the joint worked perfectly fine.

"Please remove the overcoat."

She stiffened. "No!" Her voice was loud and panicked, and a momentary hush fell on the bunker. She repeated much more quietly, "I will not."

"Captain, if you do not remove your overcoat, I cannot check for infection."

"I'll take the risk," Spalko growled, sliding off the cot and marching quickly out of the tent, with little consideration for the feelings of the doctor. She hurried back to her and Karov's bunker to find him preparing for bed.

"Might as well go to sleep early," he said with a shrug. "Besides, look outside." The slush had turned to soft snow, coating their camp in a blanket of white broken only by the bonfire crackling in the center. "It's quite beautiful, don't you think?"

Peering back out the door of the bunker, Spalko's lips curved into a dry smile. "Quite so. Although I don't think it will be so pleasant in the morning."

She shook off her overcoat, hanging it over the end of her bunk and sat down, tugging at the gauze she had taken from the doctor's tent. She fingered at the glass in her forehead, picking at it with her nails until it came loose, and she winced visibly before covering it with gauze.

"Here." Karov sat down beside her, and she turned to face him, already tugging at the second piece of glass, lodged along her temple. Karov's fingers met her own, and it came loose, like a young child losing a tooth.

It was a long process, prying free each shard, and the pain was decidedly worse than getting shot. Karov placed the last gauze on her chin, and she frowned at him through the bandages.

"This is familiar," she said bitterly, her jaw clenched in pain.

"Something about near-death experiences, Captain," replied Karov with a smirk. Spalko shed her uniform and put on the rough sweater she always slept in, grimacing as it settled unevenly over the bump of her stomach.

"How long?" she asked Karov, standing in front of him. "How long before the soldiers notice?"

"I don't know. Maybe a month. Maybe less."

"Damn it all," Spalko muttered, groaning quietly. She almost wanted to sit back down next to Karov, but it brought back memories of the evening she had first realized she was pregnant, as they leaned against the bunk and searched for the right answer to their problems, ultimately deciding that there wasn't one.

"It's a bit heart-warming, actually." Karov offered a lopsided smile, almost hopeful. "That we have defied probability so many times."

"Don't get your hopes up," Spalko drawled, and Karov held out his hands again.

"May I?"

She rolled her eyes. "Sure."

He pressed his hands to either side of her abdomen, grinning, to hold his hands to the bare skin that lay between him and their child, without the barrier of a thick army coat. It was not often he was allowed this privilege; it had not been granted since the morning after their transfer of base camps. His eyes crinkled warmly as he felt the curve of her belly swelling since the last time. It was a moment of simple contentedness in a world of complications, and hope surged through him that maybe, somehow, they would survive. It gave him the courage not to take his hands away.

Hesitantly, he took Spalko's hand and drew her closer to him until he could press his ear against the surface of her stomach and hear a blissful, wonderful silence that was just as meaningful as if he had heard a heartbeat. He knew that she had tensed, fingering the end of her sweater anxiously. She was quite near trembling from overwhelming emotion that she had done her best to suppress for so long.

"Damian." Her voice broke the reverent silence, cracking with pain. She held her hand to his cheek as he listened to the silence of an unborn baby's innocence—innocence of the torture the world was dragging them through. "I am sorry."

It was the fourth time she had said it. She still did not quite know what she was sorry for, because she could think of nothing she regretted. Yet guilt was eating her alive.

"Do you… feel anything?" she asked, as he lifted his head. Her face was both perplexed and overcome with sentiment, but her lips had tightened, as they always did when she tensed.

He shook his head. "No. Well, I feel all sorts of things, but not physically, no. Why?"

"Because I can feel it kick." Her face was unreadable. Etched in its lines was immeasurable love, but also a soul-crushing, indescribable suffering. But he swore that through the candlelight and the stiffness of the gauze on her cheeks, for only a moment, he could see a genuine smile.

**Since it was the holidays, I decided a bit of fluff (well, ish) was in order. But you do get the battle I promised you. This will quite possibly be my last update of 2014. So, happy holidays, hope you cut yourselves a break from the craziness of reality for a while. **

**-Valkyrie**


	10. Chapter 10

**It's been a little while, but here's chapter ten. Yes, it's been ten full chapters already! I cannot believe I'm ten chapters into this. Wow. All right, here's an ahead of time warning for heavy feels. Like, HEAVY feels, beyond the normal dose that's been in the last few chapters.**

**You've been warned. Thanks as always to my lovely beta reader! Hope you enjoy... in a twisted sense.**

Spalko lifted her head, her vision blurred as she came to beneath a bright light. She immediately reached for the gun at her hip, but her entire holster was missing. Her eyes widened, and she sat bolt upright, only to find that she was seated at an old wooden desk. Realizing that the offending light source was a small lamp leaning over her head, she put it out and let her eyes adjust to the dim overhead light.

Behind her, an examination table sat in the middle of the room, of the sort used by morticians and student scientists to examine corpses. Spalko tucked her hair behind her ears, deciding she ought to grow accustomed to her surroundings. She was in a laboratory of some sort that felt to her both new and familiar, as if she had turned up in a life she could quite easily have lived, had her choices been slightly different.

She found it more of an effort to stand as she was used to; she was shocked to find that over the course of a few hours, her pregnancy had progressed by what seemed like months, to the point that it would be quite impossible to hide with the military-issue overcoat that didn't seem to be in her possession now anyway. In fact, she was dressed entirely in civilian clothing, with the exception of a grey lab coat and a pair of thin leather gloves.

The door to the laboratory swung open, and a man wheeled in another table, the corpse beneath it hidden beneath a sheet. She squinted, trying to make out his face, but found it blurred, as if she was watching him through fogged glass.

"Doctor Spalko, the specimen is ready."

She found herself nodding briskly, suddenly aware of exactly what the man was talking about. "Excellent," she replied, gesturing to an empty space in the lab, "put him here." She had waited a long time for this; she knew that much, although she could hardly fathom what lay beneath the sheet.

He glanced between her face and her heavily swollen belly. "Are you sure you want to do this now?"

"Absolutely," she hissed, feeling her hackles rise. "I have run this project for years; it's about time we have something to show for it. I would not miss this moment for anything."

The doctor dipped his head and backed out of the room, and Spalko looked down at the covered body. What, she wondered, had she found? She knew it was important; it was terribly important, for she had dedicated such a huge portion of her life to it. Of course, she had no context as to what it was she had dedicated her life to, but her excitement built with each step she took toward finding out.

Her eyes gleamed with barely contained anticipation, and she became briefly aware of the obsessive devotion with which she had carried out her project. Obtaining this body was everything.

A stretched smile creeping onto her face, Spalko lifted the sheet.

The first thing she noticed was that the corpse was still clothed, in black robes, and an equally black hood, and for a moment she grumbled in frustration at the doctor who had delivered the body to her. Were they not aware that an autopsy could only be performed on a body when it had no clothes?

Its face was shadowed beneath its hood, and she was reaching over the table to lift it when she noticed the blade. It lay beside its deceased owner, a long, curved blade on a polished wooden hilt. The scythe lay flat, but even then she felt as if it had pierced her heart.

The creature on her autopsy table, which they had waited for so long to obtain, was Death.

Her fingers shaking, Spalko picked up a thin pair of scissors and cut through the sleeve of Death's cloak. She wondered to herself why she had ever wanted to come face to face with Death, but still the anticipation of the knowledge she could gain from this autopsy outweighed her reservations.

She pulled Death's cloak aside from its chest to find another layer of clothing; a thick army coat rough with dried blood around the chest area. She knew that Death had not been shot; she had given orders to kill the creature humanely.

She reached forward to take off the hood, but just before her fingers clutched the fabric, Karov walked in. He was the only person who entered her laboratory without knocking and without wheeling in a specimen for her research.

"Karov," she whispered, looking up. He was cleaner, she realized, less worn down, and his face less weathered. This was not the soldier she knew, yet she loved him nonetheless.

"Why thank you for such a formal address, Irina," he said with a smirk, his hands in the pockets of his own lab coat. His brow furrowed with concern as he scrutinized her. "You seem tense. More so than usual anyway." His eyes caught the body on the table. "Is that him? Death?"

"It," she corrected, glancing at the body, her nose wrinkling at the beast.

Karov cocked his head, almost mesmerized by the hooded figure. "It seems odd." He grimaced and laid his hand on Spalko's shoulder, though it slid quickly down to the stretched skin of her abdomen. The distant memory of shadowy bunkers and melting candles drifted into her mind, but she could hardly process the thought. She felt removed from it.

"What seems odd?"

"This proximity of life and death," he said. "The beginning of life and the end of it, all in one room."

"Sentimental fool," Spalko muttered, but a smile graced her features nonetheless. "You ought to be off dissecting cryptid corpses."

"And you ought _not _to be dissecting cryptid corpses in your condition, but you don't see me objecting." He grinned cheekily. "Not to mention I brought a guest."

He gesture to the door, and the hesitant face of a young child peered in.

"Natalya," Spalko breathed, and Natalya shuffled farther into the room. Spalko re-covered Death with the autopsy sheet, shielding Natalya's young eyes from the corpse.

"What brings you here?" she asked softly.

The innocence in Natalya's eyes was a refreshing change from the world she usually saw. The little girl's small lips turned upward in a warm smile. "I missed you," she said. "I got lonely."

In the back of her mind, Spalko knew something was off. Natalya shouldn't be there. But she was so pleased to see her that the cynical, nagging voice in the back of her head remained silent.

Then Natalya reached out, her fingers spread wide, and she remembered another such hand, callused and hesitent, which she had rejected. Another face raw with conflicting emotions, the most dominant being hope.

Hope was what she had given Natalya.

She gently took Natalya's curious, innocent hand and guided it to her midsection.

Natalya looked down at Spalko's rounded belly and then into her eyes, where she knelt in her lab coat on the floor, at equal height with the child.

"Take care of her," said Natalya, her voice imploring, almost pleading. "Like you did for me."

"What do you-" Spalko started to ask, but Natalya was already walking out the door, Karov right behind her, without a word, vanishing as they turned the corner.

After a moment's silence, she put their exit from her mind and uncovered Death's corpse once more. She pulled back its hood determinedly, averting her eyes. She didn't know why exactly she looked away, but when she looked back, her stomach lurched.

The face of death was that of a human woman. Late thirties, with a stern face and short-clipped hair. Angular, almost gaunt, and unhealthily pale.

She turned the head to the side, and her stomach churned. Just below the right ear was a thin, jagged scar. Spalko's fingers flitted over her own ear, where glass from the windshield of their army truck had cut her in the winter.

She clutched her chest, backing away from the corpse. It was her. Older, more worn than she thought possible, but her nonetheless. She was death and life, she realized, reaching down to her abdomen for reassurance.

Then Death blinked. The child inside her kicked once, as if in response, so violently that she stiffened and backed into the wall, her fingers tightening over her belly. The creature's hand mirrored hers from where it lay on the autopsy table. Then, as it got up, its pale feet stepped on its cloak, and it fell back, its head hitting the table edge. She could feel herself start to slip, her feet sliding out from under her as her head hit the wall, and she faded out of consciousness.

* * *

Spalko jerked wide awake as she felt a hand on her forehead. Sitting up, she grabbed the arm attached to it and twisted, her eyes wild.

"Agh," Karov groaned, trying to tug is arm free. Upon seeing him, Spalko relaxed.

"Apologies," she muttered, freeing his arm. "It is an instinctive reaction. You would do well not to touch me as I sleep."

Karov's lips twitched hesitantly. "You were in a panic. I thought you might be ill."

"No," said Spalko, shaking her head. "A rather disturbing dream; that was all. Come. We run the perimeter check this morning."

She got to her feet and changed into her uniform, but before she could slide her arms through the sleeves of her overcoat, Karov stopped her hand. "What?" she asked, turning around.

"Not yet," he said quietly.

Spalko turned around to face him, rolling her eyes. "This is a perimeter check, Lieutenant. We are not putting ourselves in nearly as much jeopardy as we do nearly ever other day."

"Every day, there is a chance that we die. We ought to live the best we can before that day comes."

"We _ought _to have stayed away from each other from the beginning, but," she sighed, "I suppose it is far too late for that now."

She leaned into him as he captured her lips in his own, his left hand gently cradling the nape of her neck, the other settling beneath the curve of her abdomen that tugged at the buttons on her uniform.

"If we survive for a bit longer," he said, "we can take leave. In a unit this small, we have lost enough men that the Soviet Union will send troops to replace us."

Spalko sighed, the lines in her face becoming more pronounced with worry. "I doubt it will be possible; either the soldiers will take notice of my condition or I will lose the baby before then. We decided, Karov, that some things are inevitable."

He crouched down, setting his ear once more to her belly, and she rolled her eyes; however, she could not deny the welling of love that rose in her chest as she watched the scene unfold. It was inexplicable, the love she felt for both of them, as it always had been. It was contradictory to the laws of survival, and surely natural selection would weed them out eventually. She only hoped that somehow, through the same inexplicable forces which dictated her love for Karov, they would pull through.

"Karov," she muttered, her voice low, lacking its usual authoritative tone. He stood up and handed Spalko her overcoat.

"You're right," he told her, putting on his own coat. "We should go."

The empty truck was waiting for them by the entrance to the base camp. She climbed in the driver's seat, and Karov the passenger seat. The camp was eerily quiet, not even a cricket chirping, far too cold for insects. The only signs of life were the bootprints in the frosted grass where they had walked to the truck.

Spalko twiddled an unlit cigarette in her fingers, then stuck it between her teeth. She'd gotten into a habit of chewing the ends, ever since she had been unable to light one without heaving up her food.

"It really is a beautiful day," said Karov, his breath misty in the cold morning air.

"For a war zone," Spalko muttered, starting the ignition. "Keep an eye out for anything unusual."

Spalko scanned the trees in her peripheral vision as she drove. She had come to realize that the one advantage she gained from her pregnancy in the field was heightened senses. The leafless trees shivered in the slight wind that made goosebumps on her neck, her eyes catching every dead leaf that blew their way.

Karov trained his gun out the window, just in case of an ambush. It was unlikely, but there were still German troops a few miles west of them, and it hardly hurt to be careful. On the driver's side, they passed trees covered in frozen dew; on the passenger's side, fields of shriveled grass splattered with burned patches where mines had gone off in the past.

She shivered slightly, huddling deeper into her overcoat. Karov glanced over his shoulder. "Are you all right?" he asked.

"Fine. Only thinking." Her words were terse; she much preferred silence this early in the morning. It allowed her time to turn things over in her head before the day began, a ritual she had begun during her stay at the Petrov base.

Her gaze fixed on the road ahead of her as she turned to the right, between two small fields.

"Stop." Karov's voice was urgent, and she slammed the breaks. She lurched forward, and for a moment she thought she might hurl, but she swallowed the bile as the truck came to a halt.

Spalko took a deep breath, her head pounding. "What?" she demanded hoarsely.

"I saw a flash. Like from an automatic." Karov climbed out of the truck, his pace quickening as he walked toward the field, Spalko close behind.

"Where did you see it?" She caught up to him, grabbing ahold of his shoulder.

Karov pointed about twenty meters short of the tree line. "There." He started toward it.

"Are you sure?" she called to his back, drawing her pistol.

"No," said Karov, over his shoulder, "but we ought to make sure. You stay there, while I check it out." The tone of concern bothered Spalko; for a moment she was tempted to follow him out of annoyance of his attempt to keep her safe. Then, faintly, she felt a soft kick from the baby she carried, and elected to return to the truck. There it was again. That rush of love and protectiveness she felt curl around her heart and seep into her bones.

She saw the explosion before she heard it. A fraction of a second flash, and a ball of fire that erupted like a volcano in the middle of the field, smoke stretching to the sky.

"Karov," she whispered hoarsely. As the smoke cleared, there was no sign of him. It had only been a few seconds of fiery chaos, but he had disappeared completely.

"Lieutenant Karov!" she shouted, striding briskly toward the smoldering grass. The thought briefly flitted through her mind of a possible enemy infiltration, as he'd thought he had seen a flashing automatic. Yet she knew that if they had not fired at the blast or at his approach, he had most likely seen wrong. Still, she fired off her pistol once at what Karov had deemed the source of the flash, and with no response she found it safe to continue. "Damian!"

In her heart, she knew he would not reply. The shape and pattern of the blast indicated it was an unexploded land mine, and Karov had undoubtedly stepped on it without noticing. He had detonated the mine, and thus he had been standing precisely on top of it. Statistically speaking, there was little to no chance that he survived.

As she approached the smoldering grass, her heart lurched, her stomach flipping in circles. The mine had blown a hold in the field, its pieces spread across the blast area like shards of a broken mirror.

In the middle, laid on the ground as if he had been prepared for an autopsy, was Damian Karov.

Spalko knelt beside him where he lay, nearly unrecognizable through burns.

"Damian," said Spalko, her voice husky with the smoke she'd inhaled approaching the blast area, that was turning in her stomach and threatening to upheave at any moment. "Man down!" she shouted, but there was no one to hear her. Her voice softened again as she turned back to Karov. "Hold on. Field medics will arrive relatively quickly; they are trained to act on call. Hold on for a few minutes."

She was babbling, and she knew it. She had been conscious of her denial from the very second she saw his body, spread-eagled on the ground.

_It's odd, _she thought, her mind spinning in circles, _this proximity of life and death. _The closeness of a fragile new life to the burning wreckage of its blood father.

It was then, kneeling over the lifeless corpse of her lieutenant, her friend, the father of her child, that she cried. She could not remember the last time she had wept freely, perhaps when she was a young child. But there was nothing else to do here.

_How underwhelming. _There were always stories, in the army, of those who had died. They were stories of heroism, more dramatic with each retelling. She had always pictured her own death and that of her lieutenant as a spectacular event, in the midst of combat. The bullet would strike his chest, close enough to his heart that there was no saving him, but far enough that he had time for a speech: a magnificent, life-altering speech about courage and greatness. Or perhaps he would fall in single combat, an old-fashioned duel, and tumble from a bridge into a deep, murky river, his death shrouded in mystery, his body never to be found.

She had never once thought that he would go so unimpressively. Alone in a field, his foot on a land mine left over from battles already come and gone. It was not simply Karov whom she wept for, but the unfulfilled tale of heroic sacrifice and romanticism they had both come to expect during the war.

"I'm sorry," she said to the motionless body of Karov, silenced before a bold farewell speech, blown to bits in an empty field where he thought he had seen a firearm, her hand on his chest. Her other hand clutched her lower abdomen, resting atop the soft swell of their child, who still kicked feebly against the growing bump. She coughed, her throat rough from smoke and unconcealed sobs.

"I'm so sorry."

**Well. That was painful to write. Chips, not bags of air? *sheepish grimace***


	11. Chapter 11

**Well. I'm back. After a long, long time. Apologies all around to anyone who's still reading! And thank you to GraciaJavert for giving me the little nudge I needed to get off my backside and write another chapter. I was a bit distraught after offing Karov, and rather nervous about how I'd go about this chapter. Even now I have mixed feelings about it.**

**Thanks as always to my wonderful beta reader! Hope you enjoy, in that weird tragic way we enjoy depressing stories.**

Spalko sat at the side table in her bunker, the outer flaps drawn shut so tightly she could feel the shadows wrap around her body and draw her deeper into the empty darkness of her thoughts. Her candle had burned out nearly an hour ago, but she made no effort to relight it.

She gnawed relentlessly at the end of her cigarette, grinding her teeth together anxiously. After recording her report on Lieutenant Karov's death, she had received a telegram detailing reinforcements to the two units currently stationed at her post, including a second-in-command to replace Karov.

The soldier in her had been satisfied. With Karov dead, it was impossible for her to delegate her duties as Captain, and the efficiency of her unit had dropped in the days since his passing. It only made sense for a replacement to be sent as quickly as possible, for promoting one of the hormonal nineteen-year-old boys in her unit was tactical suicide.

The lover in her, however, still making its voice heard despite how badly she wanted to deny its very existence, could not bear the thought of trusting someone other than Karov to stand behind her in combat. She could think of no one else for whom she might take a bullet. She was still in the process of grieving her loss, and she doubted she could even smoothly address her new Lieutenant.

She could replay his death second by second, and had more times than she could count in the days since it happened. How she had broken down that morning and wept in the frozen grass, as if all the tears she had spared herself since age five had suddenly come spilling over. She had wept for so long she could feel sunlight heating her back by the time she finally stood.

There had been no use in bringing his body back. Some soldiers said that they wanted their bodies returned to their families. She had never discussed her family with Karov, and in turn he had never brought up his own. Not that it was uncommon for a soldier not to mention his family, or his home. It wasn't a topic often spoken of; it was a reminder of their inevitable demise, a wake-up call that rang each time they fantasized about going home in once piece when the war was over.

But even if she had known of his family, she doubted she could have brought herself to move his body. His family did not deserve the heartache she herself was experiencing, seeing him in such a state. Not even human—simply another body, another casualty, another statistic of the war. Another burnt out cigarette, its ashen paper floating away in the wind.

So she had left him in the field. It was the type of place he'd have liked to be buried in, anyway. He would have loved to witness the shameless romanticism of his final resting place. The sun slowly rising, casting a golden glow over every blade of grass from there to the horizon like an endless sea of fireflies, of bunker candles and cigarillo tips.

She fingered the dog tags she had taken from his body shortly before driving back to camp to deliver the news of his death. They had undoubtedly heard the explosion, but it was her job to tell the unit its second commander had been blown sky high in an empty field.

They had been disappointed, though hardly surprised. They had acquired the same numbness Spalko had fought so hard to maintain. She had failed, and now she was unsure whether she wanted to succumb to that numbness again. As much as it hurt her to remember, she knew that it would hurt even more to forget.

At the sound of an approaching vehicle, Spalko shook herself from the memories. She rose to her feet, suddenly overly conscious of the swell of her stomach with child; while it lacked the magical quality she had shared with Karov, she could still feel the love which overcame her. It was a dulled, broken love, but no less consuming as it had once been.

She allowed her fingers to trail over the bump of her child—hers and Karov's—one last time before she put on her overcoat. For a moment, she turned around, expecting Karov to be standing there with that look on his face of overwhelmingly shameless joy at seeing their child continue to grow.

There was only a thick, suffocating darkness, in which her misery and anxiety had thrived for the last hour. She felt stifled, suddenly, desperate to breathe again, so she opened up the canvas doors of her bunker and faced the afternoon.

There really was little to be done until their reinforcements had been briefed and sorted into their bunkers. Without the new blood, they were unable to capture the next town on their route. They could hold down their own fort, but the offensive was out of the question. She had organized the camp immaculately upon her arrival, keeping everything and everyone in their assigned places. It was a good reminder for her now, that while she was grieving a dead lover, the boys around here were becoming soldiers, a mechanized fighting machine that it was her job to operate smoothly.

She noted with equal parts optimism and trepidation that their promised reinforcements had arrived, carrying with them three German prisoners of war. The first was clearly an officer; she could see it in the way he carried himself, with his jaw set and his chin up. It was obvious he was the highest ranking of the three; the other two were hardly different from her own soldiers. Boys in the guise of men, paying for their supposed acts of courage or regretting the day they were drafted.

She almost felt sorry for them.

Behind the prisoners of war were two cars and a truck with fresh faces and ammunition. The soldiers who stepped out, though, were just as worn down as those already living in the bunkers. They walked with the heavy step of children who had seen too much sorrow at too young an age.

Scanning the new recruits with a hawk's eye, she spotted their own highest ranking officer, undoubtedly the man who would replace Karov as her Lieutenant. He was stiff, his uniform buttoned to the top button. He tucked his cap tighter over his head as he stepped off the truck and approached the commander of the other unit.

He was older, perhaps eight years older than herself, with bags beneath his eyes and rigid frown lines etched into his skin.

It was the way he walked, though, that caught her attention, as if nothing could phrase him. He would take no disobedience from those below him. His brow furrowed in critical scrutiny toward his surroundings. Her mind turned back to the moment she had entered the training bunkers to meet her own unit, how she had pinned a soldier against the wall and spat in his face. It was the same fire which she saw in his eyes—the stubborn pride of a commander who had worked his ass off to get where he was.

At least he wouldn't shirk his duty.

Captain Amelin pointed toward her, the older man following his hand until his eyes landed on Spalko. She saluted, and he returned the gesture. Unlike Karov, she had no knowledge of this man's military history, not even his name. He was entirely unknown to her.

* * *

As he rolled into the camp, Lieutenant Dovchenko allowed himself to take in the beauty of his surroundings: the trees bare, snow glittering in the afternoon sun. He squinted through the bright sunlight. He had recently been moved off the last fighting fronts in Poland to the advance guard, and he had to admit he was pleased to be out of the main fray, at least temporarily.

At first appearance, the advance camp was completely uninhabited, but if he looked closely he could see the ruffle of bunker flaps where the young soldiers were roughhousing through their card games. The trees grew thickly throughout the camp, shielding it partially from view. He could see the command post in the back, as well as the makeshift hospital set up on the camp's Southern edge.

It was a deceptively clean, quiet arrangement, and it made him uncomfortable.

He had been born into an average family, grown up with an average schooling. Nothing outside his height had particularly stood out about him, although he had never felt truly inclined to show his intelligence during his childhood.

He saw nothing wrong with a perfectly run camp—but this, this was an act. He could sense the quiet disruption. Something was out of place, slightly crooked. It drove the January cold further into his bones.

Dovchenko climbed out of the car, catching sight of the camp's commanding officer. He pushed his hat down and approached the man-he was short, well-trimmed. The average, practical unit commander.

"Captain Arcadi Amelin," he said, extending his hand. Dovchenko shook it skeptically. Was he being patronized?

"Lieutenant Anton Dovchenko." He jerked his chin, his lips tight.

"Ah," said Amelin, "you must be Spalko's Lieutenant."

Spalko. He had heard that name before—first female officer in the Russian Army, a highly intelligent commander who had earned the respect of even the highest generals and about whom every soldier who served under her had a personal horror story about. Rumors had even circulated that she was psychic—that she could read their innermost thoughts and analyze them for her own goals.

He was not afraid, though. In fact, he was curious to meet the woman who had spawned so many legends. He was curious to learn her strategies and to operate as a part of her unit.

And when he saw her approach, with a salute of her left hand, she was not at all what he had expected. He did not know what he'd expected—an older woman, perhaps, with a tightly buttoned uniform and a stiff march.

Spalko was not at all that woman, though. She was a good few years younger than he was, donning an oversized coat and a gaunt face, hands buried in her pockets, and two sets of dog tags around her neck. He could see only cheekbones and piercing blue eyes from this distance, but as she approached, her jaw tight, chewing on an unlit cigarette, he saw more. The looseness of her hair, the lines on her face both hardened with grief and softened with smile lines. She was a map with no legend, no key, to decipher her expression.

"Lieutenant," she greeted, her voice low and husky. "I am Captain Irina Spalko of this advance guard unit."

"Lieutenant Anton Dovchenko," he said again, doing his best not to sound confused. He could see her study him, like a science experiment, a certain frustration in her eyes.

She was the loose end of the camp. She had clearly worked hard to make it appear impeccable, but something about her stood out from the rest of the soldiers. It was not her femininity, but the way she carried herself. The precision of her eyes did not apply to the rest of her, as if something had snapped inside her, but she was fighting to hold it back.

"Your bunker is at the back, next to mine. We will adjourn in one hour to discuss troop movement. I will update you on our situation." She pointed to an empty bunker which Private Arman and a few other soldiers who had gone down in the last skirmish had once occupied. She would not share a bunker with her new Lieutenant, clearly.

Then she turned around and stalked away.

It was an odd first encounter, he mused, almost uncomfortable. He wondered if the last Lieutenant had been her friend.

With one last salute to Captain Amelin, he strode over to his own bunker. The belongings of old soldiers and new recruits lay scattered about, indiscernible from one another. He would be rooming with his men, then. Was Spalko testing him? Reading him?

He shook his head. He mustn't let her get to his suspicions. He took off his cap and set it on the side table, lighting a cigarette and leaning against one of the beds. He unbuttoned and rebuttoned his uniform over his chest, a nervous habit he had acquired as a low-ranking officer. He couldn't let the shirt wrinkle, even the slightest bit. Even the slightest wrinkle could get him killed.

In truth, he mused, it almost had. He'd been at the Petrov base during its days of battle use. The Germans had invaded one evening; he had been younger then, and it had been his first time in command. His commanding officer had died the previous morning, leaving him with jurisdiction over their unit.

He asked the soldiers if they felt well enough to take a formation. After all, it was past midnight, and for some of them, it had been their first night's sleep in three days. Each man saluted him, said he was absolutely fine.

He had given them a formation, and they had followed the orders. When the Germans attacked, the man on the front guard hurled up his dinner from the previous night. The entire unit's location had suddenly been revealed before they were ready, and they took heavy fire. Dovchenko could remember the slaughter that had taken place as clear as day.

They had fled the next morning—he and the five others out of two hundred who had survived the attack. The Germans abandoned the base, for they had no need to secure it, only to prevent the Russian Army from keeping ahold of it.

Shaking away his demons, Dovchenko buttoned up his shirt for the last time and left the bunker. Spalko had given him orders to meet in an hour so she could brief him on the details of their operation.

He made his way over to Spalko's tent, where he assumed she roomed with at least two other unit commanders, but he was surprised to find it absolutely silent. Carelessly, he threw open the door, figuring that it would be empty, or at least that he would find another officer who would know Spalko's whereabouts.

He flipped on the generator and blinked a couple of times, adjusting to the change in lighting. The bunker was empty aside from Spalko. Upon hearing him enter, she spun around with all the fury of a wild cat caught by surprise. Her eyes were wild, passionate even, a far cry from the empty gaze she had thrown him this morning.

"No." Her voice was low with fury, but he was surprised to find in her expression not only rage but fear, a deep and primal terror that made itself known in the trembling of her hands as she drew her gun and aimed it at his forehead.

He held up his hands taking a step back surprised and rather unnerved at this turn of events. His eyes glanced her over once, twice, finally resting on the bump of her abdomen. He opened his mouth to speak, then choked on his words in shock.

"You—you're pregnant."

Five months, at least. Her free hand tightened protectively over the soft swell.

The wildness of her eyes did not subside. He knew enough about predatory creatures to understand that they were at their most dangerous when they were at their most vulnerable.

"Sit down," she ordered, gesturing to an empty bed. He sat down.

She glared at him through those icy blue eyes, and he remembered the gun she still had in her hand. His eyes drifted down to her finger on the trigger. For a moment he thought she wouldn't speak to him, or even to acknowledge his words.

"I'm not going to shoot you here," she said dryly, her lips stretched into a thin line, neither a smile nor a grimace. She lowered the gun, but did not take her finger off the trigger. It was a sign of trust, but a constant threat. "I'm about to take leave. Keep quiet until I do, and I won't kill you."

"Why would you risk killing your Lieutenant?" It was a fair question. Statistically, her child had little chance of survival under these circumstances. His own calmness shocked him, but he couldn't bring himself to hate her. He remembered his wife and son in Moscow, from whom he only heard a few times a year. His son would be turning five in a few weeks. In that moment, he found himself physically incapable of hating her.

"I almost shot you, and now you know of my condition. Your life is the only bargaining chip I have left under these circumstances, and you can rest assured that by now I would not hesitate to have myself discharged. One more gamble is no risk to me, Lieutenant Dovchenko." She sighed, her face suddenly weary. "*Alea iacta est."

"Who is the child's father?" It was probably too forward, but his curiosity had gotten the better of him.

"Dead," she said flatly, her eyes narrowing suspiciously.

"What happened to him?"

Spalko paused, her eyes far away. Then she jutted out her chin and said, "he died in recent combat."

There was something in the ring of her voice that caught him, suggested to him that she wasn't being entirely honest. But in the end, all that would be remembered of him was that he was dead, and every soldier deserved at least to have died heroically.

***_alea iacta est_: the die is cast. It's Latin, supposedly quoted by Julius Caesar. Originally it was Greek translating to 'let the die be cast' but this version is both more well known and fit the situation better. I kind of figured Spalko would know a quote like this, given the time she would have spent studying military tactics.**

**Anyways, thanks for reading! I don't know how I feel about how I wrote Dovchenko yet but next chapter he gets more development.**


	12. Chapter 12

***"On the Road Again" plays loudly in the background* I am BACK. I said I'd be back in June, and I am. Sorry about that ridiculously long hiatus, but my train of thought is finally back on the tracks, albeit tragic, introspective, rather depressing tracks of Spalko's history. Wahoo.**

**A huge and brownie-filled thank you to LadyLini for beta-ing all this and truly making me a better writer in the process. This chapters wouldn't be half as good without your help.**

Dovchenko woke to a frosty wind and a hard knock on his door.

"Get up!" Spalko's voice rang in his ears through the bunker's walls. For a moment he could almost forget the last three days of his encampment and convince himself that she was merely the voice of another commander, in another camp.

Every officer who had ever overseen him was a face in a sea of faces. Each was the same: war-worn, hardened, and ringed with exhaustion. Spalko's face bore all the scars and trouble of a general who had been in the field a year too long, but looking closely he could just make out the laughter lines that had sewn their way into her hollowed cheeks. Every soldier had a history. Spalko's was laid out in every inch of her.

And he had become a part of it. He had become, inadvertently, a confidant. A friend. It was a badge of pride he tried not to wear openly, and a burden on his sense of justice. It was his duty to report to the general that Captain Spalko was with child, but he could not bring himself to do it. He had decided the day he met her where he would ally himself if necessary.

If he were being honest, she made him miss his family in the most cruel way possible. The pain she clearly felt each day knowing that her child would grow up without a father was something he had seen in his wife and son the morning he fulfilled his duty to the Soviet Union, walking over the doorstep in immaculate uniform. Each time he looked at Spalko, a thousand days flashed past his eyes, memories of people he was fairly sure he would never see again.

He wasn't sure whether it was the husband or the father in him, both of whom had been so distant in the last year, that made him act on Spalko's behalf with no regrets.

"Just come in," he mumbled into his hard bunk, and that she did. She seemed to have no shame nor fear of the societal divisions between men and women. Perhaps, he mused, it came from serving as an officer for so long, beside both grown men and beanpole adolescents.

"We have received a telegram from Captain Amelin. As you know, he took his unit and carried on the path ahead yesterday. They ran into a resisting German unit on their way. A skirmish ensued, with few to no casualties in Amelin's unit, but we are now tasked with the duty of retrieving the German survivors as prisoners of war while Amelin's unit moves ahead."

Dovchenko pushed himself into an upright position and got out of the bunk, still fighting off sleep from his eyelids. "How many survivors?"

"Fifteen, but one of them is in critical condition. Their commander is alive and conscious, with a grazing bullet wound to the shoulder."

Spalko tightened her lips, and for a moment she could recall watching Karov bind the graze on his own collarbone.

_You took a bullet for me? _The words rang in her head. At the time, she'd found it counterintuitive and rather foolish. Now, though, she considered it the bravest thing anyone had done on her behalf. Death, she came to realize, had a tendency to make its victims into grand heroes.

"Are we bringing them back to this base camp?"

Spalko shook her head. "They've established a new camp on the route, where it is our duty to interrogate the German commander and take responsibility for his captured soldiers."

There was something in her eyes that Dovchenko couldn't place, as there often was. But he got the sense that she was holding back. He felt sure she was providing him with all the necessary information for their assignment, but she spoke and moved with the energy that someone her age should possess, no longer aged by her grief.

"What are you thinking?"

Spalko cocked an eyebrow at her second-in-command. It was the type of question Karov would never have asked—he could have read it right off her face. She had learned very quickly that Dovchenko was clever enough to read body language, but he couldn't decipher the reasoning behind emotions. He was, Spalko noted, a highly organized pit bull.

"If I told you now, I would be shooting myself in the foot."

"To be honest, that might be exactly what you need to get out of here," Dovchenko said tersely.

Spalko frowned. "I know." For a moment, her voice drifted away from its authoritative edge, then the sharpness returned. "Round up the men, and we will depart immediately."

The road was less than desirable for travel, strewn with rocks and potholes, and on the rare occasions that Spalko opened her mouth to speak, it was through gritted teeth. She drove as smoothly as possible, but even then they had to swerve to avoid anything that appeared to be an unexploded mine—a small, hard-packed mound in the earth, barely noticeable if you weren't looking. Each time they passed one, Spalko grimaced.

"Part of me wishes we would just go up in smoke already," she told him on one such occasion, biting down on her lower lip as they rolled through another pothole.

"You don't look well," said Dovchenko.

"No shit." She shot him a resentful glare that he did not take personally. He was well aware it was taking all of her effort not to hurl, refusing to appear anything less than perfectly alert to the vehicles behind them.

A harsh sound, like a clap of thunder, erupted not fifty yards behind them, and Dovchenko turned around just in time to see the car two behind theirs blow sky high, turn in the air, and land upside down, its occupants undoubtedly scorched to ash and crushed by the landing.

"Two down." She sighed through her nose, hiding her wince as the explosion echoed in her ears. On the days that she had met with Dovchenko to explain the tactical nature of their mission, Spalko had remained entirely unfazed by the ring of gunshots in the distance. Her head would tilt just a bit at the noise, almost curious, but she would quickly return to the discussion at hand. Here, she went rigid each time a mine went off, even if the sound was barely audible, as if it were the war's way of personally slighting her.

He couldn't help the question when it slipped out of his lips. "Is that what happened to him?"

Spalko tensed more than he'd thought possible, honing her gaze in on the road ahead.

"To whom?"

"The lieutenant here before me. The one you … "

_Loved._

"That's none of your business." It was a weak defense. She had intended to snap the words, to force his incessant questioning back into his head where it belonged, but her stomach churned from the ride, and her chest ached from breathing in the dust of mines like rotten cigarette smoke, and she couldn't bring herself to speak more forcefully than a rasping, furious, whisper.

_Speaking of a cigarette … _murmured the needy voice in the back of her head. She would need one if she were going to survive the inevitable conversation to follow. She picked one from the box that sat between Lieutenant Dovchenko and herself and bit down on the end just hard enough that she could still grind her teeth in worry should she need to.

For a few excruciating moments, the silence between them curled up and settled, like the dead weight of a contented cat, on their shoulders.

"Yes," she said at last, as Dovchenko shifted uncomfortably in the passenger seat.

"How?"

At this, Spalko was silent again, but it was a thoughtful silence, almost conspiratorial. She knew he was asking for the story—the true story, not the watered-down 'he died instantly' followed by a consoling 'he was a brave man.' She knew both statements were true, but they didn't feel just. So what was the true story? What was there to tell besides the illusive peacefulness of an empty field and the beautiful golden orange color the grass and smoke turned to at sunrise?

"He stepped on it and got fried like a moth that flies too close to a flame."

_That, _she thought, _is the truth._

He didn't press the story any further, and Spalko felt a sense of satisfaction that she hadn't since Karov died.

"What was his name?"

_Why doesn't the nosy bastard stop asking questions? _She took a deep breath that trembled as she let it out and pulled the cigarette from between her teeth as if she weren't too upset to make a smart remark and too pregnant to ease her mind with a proper smoke.

"Ask the soldiers when we get there." She hadn't spoken his name since the day of his death, as if refusing to acknowledge who he was would eliminate the last seven months of her life, from the moment she met him until the morning a column of fire straight from the hellish beauty of the bright orange sunrise had swallowed him up.

Dovchenko glanced at the dog tags around her neck, then back at the road ahead of him, clearing his throat once to express that he was consciously sparing her the pain of answering anymore of his questions. He certainly hadn't run out of them.

It was fitting, thought Spalko, to hear the ring of explosions in her ears on a morning that couldn't be more different than the day Karov died. No sun had peeked through the trees this morning, and the wind stung her face as she drove, draining it of life until the only spot of color on her face was that of her icy blue eyes. Here, though, through mist and smoke, the constant threat of mines felt proper, and her grief more at home.

When she pulled up at the camp some time later, shivering slightly from the cold, dewy drive, Amelin was waiting for her. He offered a stiff salute as she and Dovchenko exited their truck, followed by their unit, minus the two who had rolled right over a mine on the way.

"I'll write the damage report," said Dovchenko as Spalko returned Captain Amelin's salute. She caught a hint of guilt in his voice, but she ignored it.

"Please do," she said briskly. Amelin gesture toward a closed off building near the edge of the camp, guarded by three members of his unit. "The prisoners are being held there for the time being." Then he pointed to a bunker in the camp's center. "If you would please interrogate their commander, he is in there. One of my men is with him now.

Spalko raised her eyebrows. "One?"

"With a gun pointed at the commander's head."

"Fair enough."

As the only officer in the camp who spoke German, any communication with prisoners was her duty alone, so she stalked to the bunker with as much confidence as she could muster. After so long risking the life of her child, even after Karov had perished so quickly and so arbitrarily, she had become rather tired of it, as if dangerous situations were a simply a bad habit she ought to quit. If the interrogation went wrong, as she knew it could, it would go _very _wrong.

Amelin's soldier saluted her as she entered and backed away to guard the door, noting that everything in the bunker had been removed except for the small table so similar to the ones at which she had sat with Karov discussing strategies and troop movements for so many nights.

The German officer was not nearly as well-trimmed an image as her mind had conjured—slick, buttoned up, his eyes hardened with menace and the stench of blood on his hands. So often she had pictured her enemies as framed silhouettes of the Devil himself, or perhaps marching clones of Adolf Hitler. This man was neither of those things. He was of tall, lanky stature, middle aged, with thin greying hair and the sad brown eyes of a tired basset hound. He hunched in the chair, his cheeks as sunken in as her own from lack of proper nourishment, his uniform torn and hanging limply over his weakened frame. He was a beaten man; even his proud aquiline nose seemed to droop cartoonishly with grief and age.

She had planned to get right to the questions, but looking at him, she found herself uttering a soft but grudging 'good day' in clear but heavily accented German, to which he responded likewise.

"How many men were in your unit, officer?"

He did not tell her his name, and she did not ask. It wasn't the purpose for which she had come here. She turned to the guard. "How many did your men count, dead and alive?"

"Fifty."

"Fifteen alive, as of this moment."

"There were fifty-five." The old officer spoke in a low, gravelly voice that once would have carried as much authority of her own. He was as broken as she was, but she had something to live for.

"Does he have any reason to lie to us?"

The young guard shook his head. "Not as far as I know."

"Very well." She turned back to the prisoner. "Five of your men escaped, then. Where is the closest town?"

"Vernich, on Germany's eastern border. Not even thirty miles from here."

Spalko was not quite sure what to make of his cooperation, but she was satisfied with his answer. There was nothing more she required of him at the moment, so she stood up and left, with a terse nod to the guard, feeling the German's eyes on her back with each step she took.

She quite nearly ran into Captain Amelin only a few meters from the bunker. "Did he give you the information?" he asked impatiently.

"He did. Fifty-five men were in his unit; we have five escapees that we'll have to account for in the report and in our movements toward the German border. We have reason to believe they are fleeing to Vernich."

"The officer held no information back, eh?" Amelin's voice was smug, almost gloating, and a thin smile grace his lips. Instantly, Spalko was suspicious.

"You think he was lying to us?"

Amelin snorted complacently. "He had better not be lying. He has every reason to tell us the truth."

"Do tell." Spalko rested a hand on her hip. She sensed that in the little he had told her about their German prisoner, she had been missing one very significant piece of information that he had clearly assumed she didn't need.

"His name is Sigmund Khan. His first commanding position was running a gas chamber outside Berlin. He's on the line to be put to death for war crimes if Germany surrenders-the Americans are closing in from France, and our men through Austria. It isn't looking good for Hitler, Captain. I suspect in a few months this war will be over."

She could almost rejoice, were it not for the knowledge that she didn't have a few months. But all she had heard distinctly was _gas chamber. _How could that tired old man have committed such a crime against the human race? That old man with the basset hound eyes who was not so different from herself? Who was just as tired of the suffering and the randomness of every single death that had come out of this war? Who just wanted it to be over?

Amelin brushed past Spalko where she stood rigid with the sudden urge to shoot him in the back of the head for his brainless self-satisfaction. Then she would walk calmly over to the bunker where Sigmund Khan was probably stewing in his own guilt and hold her revolver up to his forehead and shoot him too, as if that in itself would end the war.

Instead, she asked as low-ranking soldier for the number of Lieutenant Dovchenko's bunker, fighting to keep her voice from a raging, anguished snarl, and entered without knocking. Dovchenko was sitting at his own little table, smoking a cigar and leaning back in his chair. He opened his eyes when she entered, shrugging her overcoat so the swell of her child was clearly visible in the dim light, just to remind herself that as long as this child existed they weren't all going to go extinct killing each other off.

"Damn," Dovchenko said quietly, eyeing her swollen belly, "you need to get out."

"You're right." Her voice was still as harsh as sandpaper. "I should have left, I should have left, I should have just driven away one night and never come back!" She clenched a fistful of her hair, her knuckles digging into her forehead. She stopped pacing and stared either directly at or at something just past Dovchenko, a wild light in her eyes.

"We're on perimeter check. I need you to shoot me in the foot."

* * *

"This is mad!" Dovchenko shouted over the wind as they drove along the road outside their camp. "What will we tell Amelin?"

"That we were ambushed by one of the German deserters!" she yelled in response. There was no stopping her, no matter how crazy her plan was. "He shot me in the foot with a broken revolver before we took him down and spattered him with bullets. No use bringing the body back, because it was dead weight. Besides," she uttered a light laugh that scared the hell out of him, "didn't want him to stain the truck!"

She slammed the breaks and hopped out of the car with more agility than he had ever seen from her. "Here," she said, marching off the road into a small clump of trees. "Hidden away, nondescript, perfect."

Seeing her there, so unfazed by the idea of practically shooting herself, of waiting like Cassius for a comrade to take her down so she wouldn't have to do it herself, he was immensely frightened by her. He knew that injured soldiers would be leaving tomorrow, replaced by fresh faces for the imminent invasion of Germany, that this was her only chance to get out before she was either killed or her pregnancy noticed by one of the other soldiers. But if she was so unafraid of being shot, of pain and injury, he didn't want to be the one to indulge a reckless whim.

He shook his head. "I don't think I can." But still he found himself getting out of the car, wondering if she truly did have the supernatural power that some described. For here he was, conceding to her will even when it was absurdly dangerous and could get them both prosecuted if the incident was found out.

"Do it."

He thought of the man who was her Lieutenant before him and drew his revolver. The man she had fallen in love with, who had waited for a chance to be a true hero and never gotten it, who had never lived to see his own child because natured had decided he should be the unlucky victim of a random accident.

He pointed the gun at her foot.

The man whom Spalko had risked her life for, and who had risked his life for her. Who would have done this with no hesitation if it meant that he and Spalko could have been the only war story that didn't end in the middle of a word.

_They said his name was Damian Karov._

And he pulled the trigger.

**If you're human, I hope I broke your heart just a little, seeing as that was the chapter's secondary goal. *stereo shuts off, and music fades to silence***


	13. Chapter 13

**So, uh, it's been a year. I needed an emotional break from Spalko to work on something light and got caught up in real life and an original story I've been writing. So if you're still here, thank you so much for being patient.**

**Also, huge thanks to my beta reader Lini for sticking around in my twelve months of ignoring this story, catching my grammatical errors and giving great suggestions, and for validating my coffee addiction.**

Spalko squeezed her eyes a bit tighter as the truck rolled through another pothole. Every rut in the dirt was a shell in her mind. She could not be sure of the exact moment she had decided she wanted to live. In the weeks before Karov died, they had toyed with the possibility that she could carry their baby to term. Somehow his death had made her infinitely more determined to do so.

She sat hunched in the back of the truck with other soldiers who had been granted a leave of absence due to injury—those whose wounds made them a liability in combat, but were minor enough that they could be transported back to Moscow.

The young man across from her sneezed, and it froze in the dark, a cloud of ice crystals falling to the floor. "I'm sorry," he mumbled weakly.

"No trouble." Even here, she held a certain authority. Her rank made her the officer of the hospice truck; the ill and wounded looked to her as their leader. Compared to the others, Spalko was quite well; she was the only person aboard the truck who didn't speak as if she had gravel in her throat.

"Captain Spalko." The young soldier croaked her name, sitting up on his elbows and leaning against the wall.

She lifted her eyebrow. "Yes?" she asked coldly. She had every intention of isolating herself from the other passengers. Her immediate goal was to bring herself and her child to safety. She had always found herself lacking in love and compassion, and she could not spare what she had for one more stranger who settled into her life. She had attempted to bond with strangers before—Natalya, Karov. She had always ended the encounters feeling hurt and grief, two emotions that could gravely impact her judgement.

In truth, she simply felt as sick as everyone else in this truck, although her sickness was more difficult to detect. She suffered from a self-inflicted gunshot wound; she was tired, hungry, cold, pregnant with a dead man's child, and, most of all, she felt betrayed by the universe. She wasn't one to put stock in fate, but she could not help but believe that the pitiful irony of her situation—that her baby's survival was a miracle, that she had beaten the odds and yet everything that could possibly go wrong seemed to go wrong, was the result of some grudge or punishment. Beating the odds left her more miserable than she had ever been, a victim of every battered wartime cliché on the planet.

"Captain Spalko, Damien Karov was your lieutenant, yes?"

She stiffened, as if in his absence Karov's name had lost its familiarity in her ears. Her own soldiers did not speak of him. Every soldier wanted nothing more than to be remembered, yet the fellows of every dead soldier would inevitably forget him, if only to cope with his passing.

"He was, before he died." If the boy didn't already know of Karov's death, she felt no guilt for breaking the news to him bluntly. He was in the back of a truck, sick and likely injured from battle. He had seen his fair share of death.

The boy's dark eyes hollowed, and his face fell, the hopefulness of youth beaten out of him. He looked perhaps fifteen years older than he was, weathered and war-beaten, his shoulders hunched with the care of a middle aged man. "I was stationed under him in Ukraine. I wondered where he had gone."

His words piqued her interest. Karov had said very little about his time in Ukraine, and she assumed that it was for the same reason she did not speak about the Petrov base. It was better for her to put those memories aside.

"Was he a good commander?"

"If he could, he buried the dead."

In a war like this one, the best commanders were remembered for two reasons: tactical brilliance and acts of humanity. Karov had been one of the best, clearly. She may have become a legend, but Karov had been a man, even when the war seemed to dictate they become automatons.

Spalko closed her eyes and leaned back against the wall of the truck. "That is something of a relief to me."

"Did you think anything less of him?" It was a challenge; this boy had obviously admired Karov. She wanted to ask his name, scour her memory for any mentions Karov could have made of him. She didn't ask.

"I was not under the impression that Karov had seen many battles."

"Our unit didn't see a lot of action in Ukraine. We had a lot more time to grow close, come to care about each other. So when one of us did die, it hurt much more."

No shit, she thought bitterly. She thought about Private Arman. She had left him gunned down in the snow and sleet, for winter to cover him up. She had left Karov in a field, still smoking like the barrel of a rifle after it's been fired. Part of her had come to assume the winter trees, standing like sentries over the dead with their branches bare as human arms, might bury them for her.

"Did you know him well?"

Too well, she wanted to say, and she couldn't decide whether it was the truth. They hadn't often spoken about their lives before the war; it was as if their childhoods had been no more than a hallucination brought on by chemical weapons, a dream that she had woken up from in the back of a truck, with a helmet and a gun in her hand. Yet she knew him as well as she knew herself.

"Well enough." She couldn't decide whether that was the truth either.

The boy coughed a loud hacking cough and lit a cigarette from his pocket. He pulled out another and tossed it to her with the lighter. She pushed the lighter back to him but stuck the cigarette between her lips for reassurance.

"Tell me a story?" the boy asked hoarsely. "About Lieutenant Karov."

"Why?"

"He was a good man, and there aren't many good men left in this war." He was right. Good was pushed out of them a long time ago to make room paranoid and alive.

"He once took a bullet for me. We were making our way to a new camp, and a German troop ambushed us. I would have died had Lieutenant Karov not been there."

"Is that how he died?"

"No."

"How did he die?"

She debated telling him the truth—the empty field, the unexploded shell, that single flash and how he had been reduced to ashes in half a second, all the intricate gears and wires that had once spun inside his head annihilated in the blink of an eye.

"We were on border patrol, doing the morning rounds. He thought he saw a flash coming from the tree line on our left. So we got out of the truck to investigate, and we found two young girls hacking through the bushes, the elder with a soldier's rifle in her hand. We decided to take them back to our camp until we could bring them home.

"Natalya, the older girl, told us that she had been playing in the forest when German troops bombed her town. She did not know if her family was alive. Her sister was too young to speak coherently. We were carrying them back to our vehicle when we came under fire from the small group of German scouts who were hunting them down. Perhaps three or four of them.

"Karov and Natalya were killed by a grenade. There was nothing I could do; they were dead in an instant. We killed the enemies, and I brought Natalya's baby sister back to camp. She will be home soon enough."

Spalko bit hard on the end of her cigarette and spat out the dry tobacco that seeped into her mouth. It was bloody—she hadn't noticed that she was gnawing on her lip as well.

"Did you bury Lieutenant Karov?"

"Yes. I buried him with Natalya." In the tall grass, at sunrise, their unborn child playing her like a drum as she kicked the embers around his body until she didn't have to see his scorched face.

The boy seemed content with her answer, his eyelids sagging. "Captain Spalko?" he murmured drowsily.

"Yes?"

"Do you believe in God?"

"You ask a lot of questions."

No. Not necessarily. She did not believe in anything, as the word _believe_ itself suggested a leap of faith, taking something unproven as fact. She knew that unexplained events sometimes occurred, that sometimes the smallest of moments and the strangest of dreams took on a warped significance, like a coded telegram relayed into her head for de-encryption.

But she did not believe. She simply considered. The last thing she had believed in was the possibility that she and Karov might both survive the war.

No, she believed in nothing, and that was why she spun relentlessly, with nothing in this world to cling to.

The young soldier drifted into a troubled sleep, wincing between his snores. She was all too familiar with the nightmares that plagued every soldier who had seen the front. She shuffled across the truck and rested a hand on his forehead—he was fevered, dangerously so. She pulled his coat tighter around him.

She shrank back into herself, watching him shiver until she dozed off between bumps in the road.

* * *

"What did he say?" Karov's face was familiar, but she could see the changes it had acquired in her memory. After enough time not seeing him, his features slowly became more distorted, and though Spalko easily recognized him, she felt their time apart weigh on her shoulders. Karov had been working at the site where they had found Death, while she performed the necessary experiments. It had been a juggle, taking turns watching the baby when they could. Their work was so invaluable that their superiors could not terminate and replace them.

Spalko leaned against a pale grey wall, taking their daughter from him and cradling her against her chest. Across from her, Karov wore a hopeful expression. "What did the General say?"

"When the dissection and investigation of Death is complete, I have permission to search for its origin. It is believed that Death originated outside this planet, and its power can be harnessed as a political asset."

"Irina, humanity already has the power to kill; we've both seen it and we use it far too often."

Spalko shook her head. "Not the power to kill. The power to know when someone will die and be prepared for it."

The baby girl in her arms wriggled and laughed, her bright eyes flicking across the room with an innocent curiosity that only small children can possess. Her fist curled around Spalko's thumb, and she felt her lips part without her permission into a genuine smile.

"It won't prevent anything, though," said Karov, furrowing his brow. "Knowing when someone will die just gives you more time to agonize over its inevitability, wait for it to happen with the understanding that you can do nothing."

"During wartime, it could allow us to call in new troops in advance if we know how many soldiers we might lose."

Karov pursed his lips. "I don't like it. You're right—it would be a useful military asset—but I do not like this."

The baby in Spalko's arms whimpered, and Karov's eyes softened. "I hope she never chooses to be a soldier."

"My father said the same about me, when I was young. Then I grew up."

"What did he want you to do?"

She sighed. "I could have been a pathologist. I also could have worked at military archaeological dig sites. I could have skipped the war and done what I do now for four years."

"Why didn't you?"

The baby began to sniffle, and Spalko held her tighter, protecting her from the world they lived and worked in.

"Do you remember returning to Moscow when the war ended and feeling shocked at how people had gone on with their lives? Do you remember the glass wall that seemed to separate you from every person you passed on the street?" Some nights, falling asleep in their home, the war had seemed like a dream to Spalko. Other nights the war was the only thing that seemed real. Every thump was a shell, every creak an ambush.

The baby had become a grounding string. She was real; she had Karov's elfish features and Spalko's intense blue eyes. She was the vanishing point they had to build their lives around, and suddenly the wall had lifted. There was still a film, sometimes, that she looked through when she faced civilians. But at least the trees were no longer distorted, uprooting themselves to shoot at her.

Karov nodded. "Of course I remember."

"That is how I felt even before I enlisted." She was too calculating to build a life and relationships outside of war. Perhaps that was how she had fallen in love with her Lieutenant. In truth, the only people she had ever loved were Karov and their baby.

"You're going back to active duty one day, aren't you?" It wasn't a question.

"I am most useful there. I belong there; my skill sets and natural inclinations have dictated it since I was a child. When she is older," she pointed with her chin to the baby, "I will return."

"I truly hope she does not become a soldier."

Spalko only hoped that her daughter did not take after her. If she chose to become a soldier, that was that, but she hoped with all her heart it would be a choice instead of an instinct or an act of survival. Spalko hoped that her daughter was not born for the military, as she had been. She said nothing.

Karov pulled her close to him, his arm over her shoulders, and kissed her soundly. He was happy here, and so was she. Neither of them were settled, though, and she could feel it. Ever the romantic, the desperate need to be a hero again, to make a difference, would one day consume him. And she would feel the instinctual tug of battle, begging her to take back command and orchestrate a victory for her country. It was not simply duty, but she imagined it was the same feeling that tied house cats to lions. Right now it was simply overwhelmed by the unconditional love driving her to act only for the best interest of her child.

The floorboards creaked. It echoed like the click of a pistol in her ears. She stiffened and gripped Karov's shoulder to alert him, but it collapsed between her fingers. She pressed a hand to his chest, and it caved, sand spilling out the sleeves of his shirt. His eyes turned grey, his face sandy, and he crumbled before her eyes. She looked down at the baby she was holding only to find that wrapped in the pale blue quilt was only a pile of sand—it was softer than the sand at her feet where Karov had stood. Karov was beach-sand, that scratched her feet when she ran, and in her arms was a desert dune, soft and fine.

* * *

She woke with a start, her head snapping up, her hair wild in her face. Across from her, the sleeping boy had stilled. No coughs came from him. She scooted across the truck and lay a hand on his neck, finding no pulse.

He was only as dead as she had expected him to be by now. She wondered vaguely if her callused hands were poisoned, sucking the life from everything she touched. Natalya, Karov, and the young soldier with the infected wound.

This time, she shed no tears. She moved back to her corner, quietly enough that she did not wake the few others, who had somehow managed to find undisrupted sleep between the bumpy path and their own aches.

The baby kicked her, tapping on her from the inside, and, with a cautious glance around the truck, she smoothed a hand over her rounding belly. She glanced back at the corpse, its face slowly gathering frost in the winter night.

She was glad she hadn't asked his name.

**Cheers, everyone! Hope Spalko made a worthy, appropriately sad return.**


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